As Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has steadily improved, FPGAs are now viable alternatives to other technology implementations for high-speed classes of digital signal processing (DSP) applications. In particular, radar front-end signal processing, an application formerly dominated by custom very large scale integration (VLSI) chips, may now be a prime candidate for migration to FPGA technology. As this paper demonstrates, current FPGA devices have the power and capacity to implement a FIR filter with the performance and specifications of an existing, in-system, front-end signal processing custom VLSI chip. A 512-tap, 18-bit FIR filter was built that could achieve sample rates of 5 MHz (with a clock rate of at least 40 MHz) using Xilinx Virtex FPGA technology, and was demonstrated through simulation. Distributed arithmetic was determined to be the most optimal structure for a FPGA FIR design, although future research may show that fast FIR algorithms or filtering in the frequency domain might give better results.