Security issues are playing dominant role in today's high speed communication systems. A fast and compact FPGA based implementation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Triple DES algorithm is presented in this paper that is widely used in cryptography for securing the Internet traffic in modern day communication systems. The design of the digital cryptographic circuit was implemented in a Vertex 5 series (XCVLX5110T) target device with the use of VHDL as the hardware description language. In order to confirm the expected behavior of these algorithms, the proposed design was extensively simulated, synthesized for different FPGA devices both in Spartan and Virtex series from Xilinx viz. Spartan 3, Spartan 3AN, Virtex 5, Virtex E device families. The novelty and contribution of this work is in three folds: (i) Extensive simulation and synthesis of the proposed design targeted for various FPGA devices, (ii) Complete hardware implementation of encryption and decryption algorithms onto Virtex 5 series device (XCVLX5110T) based FPGA boards and, (iii) Generation of ICON and VIO core for the design and on chip verification and analyzing using Chipscope Pro. The experimental as well as implementation results compared to the implementations reported so far are quite encouraging.