International audienceModern FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips, with their larger memory capacity and reconfigurability potential, are opening new frontiers in rapid prototyping of embedded systems. With the advent of high density FPGAs it is now possible to implement a high performance VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor core in an FPGA. With VLIW architecture, the processor effectiveness depends on the ability of compilers to provide sufficient ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) from program code. This paper describes research result about enabling the VLIW processor model for real-time processing applications by exploiting FPGA technology. Our goals are to keep the flexibility of processors in order to shorten the development cycle, and to use the powerful FPGA resources in order to increase real-time performance. We present a flexible VLIW VHDL processor model with a variable instruction set and a customizable architecture which allow exploiting intrinsic parallelism of a target application using advanced compiler technology and implementing it in an optimal manner on FPGA. Some common algorithms of image processing were tested and validated using the proposed development cycle. We also realized the rapid prototyping of embedded contactless palmprint extraction on an FPGA Virtex-6 based board for a biometric application and obtained a processing time of 145.6 ms per image. Our approach applies some criteria for co-design tools: flexibility, modularity, performance, and reusability

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