Because of bandwidth constraint, low bit-rate vocoders have gained increasing prominence in many digital voice communications systems including the Internet. The requirement of secure voice transmission by appropriate encryption and decryption has also prompted the widespread use of digital speech coding techniques in various military applications. This project is about speech compression using MELP codec, stands for Mixed Excitation Linear Predictive encoding. It is based on a new communication standard developed for extremely low bit data rate. The processing time required for MELP is very large limiting its use in real time applications such as handheld radio transceiver, etc. The theme of the project is to reduce MELP processing time using different optimization techniques. Texas instrument also launched a special DSP processor TMS320C55x series which is well suited for MELP codec processing.