Our proposed method L2D-CASKE, the lightweight 2-dimensional (2-D) Cellular Automata (CA) based symmetric key encryption algorithm is a 128 bit length that allows a key length of 128 bits. It is designed as a lightweight encryption algorithm. As being light weight, it can be easily applied on small devices such as wireless sensor motes, smart cards and other PDAs. An encryption algorithm having simple loop operations, based on iterative parameters is used in this work. A number of sequences and operations are used for this purpose. In this paper, the well designed algorithm was verified using MATLAB 7.7 (R2008) tool and the hardware synthesized on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). To achieve this, our algorithm uses loop design based on iterations and the same is realized on FPGA. Advantages of our algorithm can be listed in terms of its flexibility for a set of given constraints, less complexity involved in its performance. This is achieved through the usage of generic VHDL coding. Virtex-4 XC4VL25 -10ff668 is used as a test device in Xilinx 9.1 for realizing our algorithm.