FPGA implementation of decimal processors for hardware acceleration

Applications in non-conventional number systems can benefit from accelerators implemented on reconfigurable platforms, such as Field Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, we show that applications requiring decimal operations, such as the ones necessary in accounting or financial transactions, can be accelerated by Application Specific Processors (ASPs) implemented on FPGAs. For the case of a telephone billing application, we demonstrate that by accelerating the program execution on a FPGA board connected to the computer by a standard bus, we obtain a significant speed-up over its execution on the CPU of the hosting computer.