This paper presents an FPGA-based algorithm for automatic detection of QRS complexes in ECG signals. The proposed algorithm is divided into 3 blocks: Filtering, Contrast Enhancement, and finally a Detection block based on time and amplitude thresholding of the enhanced data. The entire detection scheme was developed in accordance with embedding constraints. For validation, the method was tested on the MIT/BIH arrhyth- mia database containing 48 records of 30-minutes ECG. The FPGA-based algorithm correctly detects 95,65 percent of the QRS complexes, with a very limited ratio of false detection (only 8%). These results are in accordance with the most recent state-of- the-art off-line algorithms on the same database, and improves significantly FPGA-based ones that were tested on a limited number of ECG extracted from the MIT/BIH set of data.