Couple to the communications wired and unwired networks growth, is the increasing demand for strong secure data transmission. New cryptographic standards are developed, and new encryption algorithms are designed, in order to satisfy the special needs for security. SHA-2 is the newest powerful standard in the hash functions families. In this paper, a VLSI architecture for the SHA-2 family is proposed. For every hash function SHA-2 (256, 384, and 512) of this standard, a hardware implementation is presented. All the implementations are examined and compared in the supported security level and in the performance by using hardware terms. This work can substitute efficiently the previous SHA-1 standard implementations, in every integrity security scheme, with higher offered security level, and better performance. In addition, the proposed implementations could be applied alternatively in the integrations of digital signature algorithms, keyed-hash message authentication codes and in random numbers generators architectures.