The authors believe that special-purpose architectures for digital signal processing (DSP) real-time applications will use closely coupled processing elements as array processor modules to implement the various portions of the new algorithms, and several such modules will cooperate in a pipelined manner to implement complete algorithms. Such an architecture, based upon systolic modules, for the MUSIC algorithm is presented. The architecture is suitable for VLSI implementation. The throughput of the pipelined approach is O(N), whereas the sequential approach is O(N/sup 3/). >