This paper proposes a new VLSI architecture for morphological filters and presents its chip design and implementation. The proposed architecture can significantly reduce hardware costs compared with existing architecture by using a feedback loop path to reuse partial results and a decoder/encoder pair to detect maximum/minimum values. In addition, the proposed architecture requires one common architecture for both diltion and erosion and fewer number of operations. Moreover, it can be easily extended for larger size morphologica operations. We developed VHDL (VHSIC hardware description language) models, performed logic synthesis using the SYNOPSYS CAD tool. We used the SOG (sea-of-gate) cell library and implemented the actual chip. The total number of gates is only 2,667 and the clock frequency is 30 MHz that meets real-time image processing requirements.