The architecture and implementation of a novel VLSI bit-level systolic Vector Quantization processor is described. This architecture offers very high data throughput for real-time processing applications. Given a codebook of size

and dimension

, an input vector can be quantized every

clock cycles, compared to O(kN) cycles for a Single-Instruction, Single-Data (SISD) machine. Any distortion measure which can be expressed as a Euclidean vector inner product can be computed with this array.