A transformer is the most widely used equipment in power systems to transfer energy from one circuit to another. For real-time electromagnetic transient simulation, this paper presents a digital hardware emulation of the power transformer on a field programmable gate array. The linear model of the transformer is based on the admittance matrix approach. Detailed real-time modeling of the transient nonlinearities, including hysteresis phenomena, is carried out based on the Preisach theory. The nonlinear solution in real time is undertaken using a full Newton iteration. All the hardware modules for the transformer emulation were developed in VHDL. The model is fully parallelized and pipelined to achieve the lowest latency and the smallest hardware resource consumption. Real-time results on the oscilloscope are compared with off-line results from the ATP software.