Speech recognition is becoming popular as a technology for the implementation of human interfaces. However, conventional approaches to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) require a high performance CPU. In this paper, we describe a speech recognition system designed using a C-based architecture design methodology, which avoids this limitation. Application specific circuits such as "Function based vector pipeline" and "Half cut method" for the first pass data processing step are designed to achieve real time recognition with low-speed CPU on a portable terminal, and its performance is evaluated.