International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper describes a 300 Mega Bit Per Second (MBPS) Front End Processor (FEP) prototype completed in early 1993. The FEP implements a patent pending parallel frame synchronizer (frame sync) design in 12 Actel 1240 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's). The FEP also provides (255,223) Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding and a High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) output interface. The recent introduction of large RAM based FPGA's allows greater high speed data processing integration and flexibility to be achieved. A proposed FEP implementation based on Altera 10K50 FPGA's is described. This design can be implemented on a single slot 6U VME module, and includes a PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) for a commercial Fibre Channel or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) output interface module. Concepts for implementation of (255,223) RS and Landsat 7 Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) decoding in FPGA's are also presented. The paper concludes with a summary of the advantages of high speed data processing in FPGA's over Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) based approaches. Other potential data processing applications are also discussed.