AbstractThe growth of low‐resource devices has increased rapidly in recent years. Communication in such devices presents two challenges: security and resource limitation. Lightweight ciphers, such as HIGHT cipher, are encryption algorithms targeted for low resource systems. Designing lightweight ciphers in reconfigurable platform (e.g., field‐programmable gate array) provides speedup as well as flexibility. The HIGHT cipher consists of simple operations and provides adequate security level. The objective of this research work is to design, optimize, and model FPGA implementation of the HIGHT cipher. Several optimized designs are presented to minimize the required hardware resources and energy including the scalar and pipeline ones. Our analysis shows that the scalar designs have smaller area and power dissipation, whereas the pipeline designs have higher throughput and lower energy. Because of the fact that obtaining the best performance out of any implemented design mainly requires balancing the design area and energy, our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to obtain such optimal performance using the pipeline design with two and four rounds per stage as well as with the scalar design with one and eight rounds. Comparing the best implementations of pipeline and scalar designs, the scalar design requires 18% less resources and 10% less power, while the pipeline design has 18 times higher throughput and 60% less energy consumption. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.