This paper assesses the arithmetic benefits provided by the Residue Number System (RNS) for building Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems with Field-Programmable Logic (FPL) technology. The quantifiable benefits of this approach are studied in the context of a new Fast Cosine Transform (FCT) architecture enhanced by using the Quadratic Residue Number System (QRNS). The system reduces the number of adders and multipliers required for the N -point Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and provides high throughput. For an FPL-based implementation, the proposed design gets significant improvements over an equivalent 2C structure. By using up to 6-bit moduli, an overall increase in the system performance of about 140% is achieved. If this speed increase is considered along with the penalty in device resources, the presented QRNS-based FCT system provides an improvement in the area-delay figure factor of about 20%. Finally, the conversion overhead was carefully studied and it was found that the quantifiable benefits of the proposed design are not affected when converters are included.