We propose an area-efficient hardware implementation of modular inversion/division, which is the most complex module in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). An improved algorithm is proposed for the common binary inversion algorithm. The proposed modular inversion has better efficiency in the area. The proposed modular inversion is designed in hardware and implemented on Xilinx Spartan-6 (XC6SLX150-2) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform and 90 nm technology respectively. The proposed modular inversion is applicable to Galois prime fields, including the elliptic curves over National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST)-recommended Galois prime fields.