The recent discovery of the constructive use of pairings in cryptography has opened up a wealth of new research options into identity- based encryption. In this paper, we will investigate the possible use of pairings in constrained environments. The focus will be on an small, en- ergy ecient ASIC implementation of an accelerator for the Tate pairing over a supersingular curve. The results are encouraging for further research. It is possible to obtain an implementation of less than 30k gates. Furthermore, large energy ef- ficiency improvements compared to other published designs are possible. Keywords. Identity-based cryptography, elliptic curve cryptography, Tate pairing, hardware accelerator, ASIC