Multiplication in finite fields is used in many applications, especially in cryptography. It is a basic and the most computationally intensive operation from among all such operations. Several systolic multipliers are proposed in the literature that offer low hardware complexity or high speed. In this paper, a bit-parallel polynomial basis systolic multiplier for generic irreducible polynomials is proposed based on a modified interleaved multiplication method. The hardware complexity and delay of the proposed multiplier are estimated, and a comparison with the corresponding multipliers available in the literature is presented. Of the corresponding multipliers, the proposed multiplier achieves a reduction in the hardware complexity of up to 20% when compared to the best multiplier for m = 163. The synthesis results of application-specific integrated circuit and fieldprogrammable gate array implementations of the proposed multiplier are also presented. From the synthesis results, it is inferred that the proposed multiplier achieves low power consumption and low area complexitywhen compared to the best of the corresponding multipliers.