In this paper, we present a pure hardware implementation of the advanced encryption standard (AES) with 8-bit data path with both encryption/decryption abilities for applications of wireless network. To achieve the requirements of low area resource and high throughput performance, the 8-bit AES design overlaps the MixColumns (MC) and ShiftRows (SR), Inverse MixColumns (IMC) and Inverse ShiftRows (ISR) operations in order to reduce the required clock cycles and critical path delay of transformations involved. The combinations of SB with ISB, MC with IMC, and SR with ISR can effectively reduce the area cost of the AES realization. We implement the AES processor in an ASIC chip. The design has the area cost of 4.3 k-gates with throughput of 72Mbps which can meet the throughput requirement of IEEE 802.11g wireless network standard. From the experimental results, we observe that our AES design has better performance compared with other previous designs.