The present design of the SNO FEC32 front end card includes several field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), manufactured by the Xilinx Corporation. These programmable logic devices are useful in their flexibility and their ability to be reprogrammed ``on the fly'', i.e., to suit temporary or permanent changes in the logical design of a device without any physical hardware change. Additionally, they take up less board space than traditional IC packages. To fully utilize their capabilities, the configuration option chosen is a slave serial load configuration where a central processor supplies the input data stream to program the device.