The design of a novel and cost-effective parallel processing system using digital signal processors (DSPs) is presented. The system can accommodate up to 16 TMS32010 processors with a total processing power of 80 MIPS. Its main application areas are speech analysis/synthesis and low bit-rate coding of speech signal for telecommunication purposes. The system can be classified as a MIMD machine. Each processor on the system has its own local memory for program and data storage. The system utilizes a dedicated local bus for processor-to-processor communications with a loosely-coupled scheduling policy. By using a simple and flexible message switch for routing the data traffic between processors, the system can emulate a wide variety of connection topologies, including pipelining and perfect shuffle network.