Algorithms for radar signal processing, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are computationally intensive and require considerable execution time on a general purpose processor. Reconfigurable logic can be used to off-load the primary computational kernel onto a custom computing machine in order to reduce execution time by an order of magnitude as compared to kernel execution on a general purpose processor. Specifically, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be used to house hardware-based custom implementations of these kernels to speed up these applications. In this paper, we demonstrate a methodology for algorithm acceleration. We used SAR as a case study to illustrate the tremendous potential for algorithm acceleration offered by FPGAs. Initially, we profiled the SAR algorithm and implemented a homomorphic filter using a hardware implementation of the natural logarithm. Experimental results show an average speed-up of 188 when using the FPGA-based hardware accelerator as opposed to using a software implementation running on a typical general purpose processor.