The programmable data plane (PDP), allowing offloading and accelerating network applications, creates revolutionary development opportunities for such applications. Also, it promotes the innovation and evolution of the network by supporting the rapid implementation and deployment of new protocols and services. It has thus been a research hotspot in the field of the network in recent years. With its general computing architecture, rich on-chip resources and extended interfaces, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) provides a variety of implementations of PDP for a wider range of application scenarios. It also offers the possibility to explore more general PDP abstraction. Therefore, FPGA-based PDP (F-PDP) has been widely concerned by the academic and industrial communities. In this study, F-PDP abstraction is described by category. Then, the research progress of key technologies for building network applications with F-PDP is outlined, and programmable network devices based on F-PDP are presented. After that, the application research based on F-PDP in recent years is reviewed in detail from three aspects: improving network performance, building a network measurement framework, and deploying network security applications. Finally, the possible future research trends of F-PDP are discussed.