Nowadays cryptography has a main role in embedded systems design. As the number of devices and applications which send and receive data are increasing rapidly, the data transfer rates are becoming higher. In many applications, this data requires a secured connection which is usually achieved by cryptography. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an approved cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. The AES can be programmed in software or built with pure hardware. This work presents the AES algorithm and its FPGA implementation. Implementation of the synthesizable and simulation of the VHDL code is carried out on Xilinx - Project Navigator, ISE 13.2i suite. All the transformations of both Encryption and Decryption are simulated using an iterative design approach in order to minimize the hardware consumption. This work proposes two new architectures for software and hardware implementations. For the software, a new JAVA application is implemented to provide the user with maximum ease and efficiency in dealing with AES and hardware integration for the AES encryption and decryption algorithm.