This paper describes the procedure of implementing a real-time speech codec, G.723.1 which was developed by DSP Group and standardized by ITU-T, using fixed-point DSP, ADSP-2181. This codec has two bit rates associated with it, 5.3 and 6.3 kbit/s. We implemented only one bit rate, 6.3 kbit/s, of the two with fixed-point 32-bit precision. According to the result of the experiment, the amount of computational burden is about 55 MIPS and its quality is similar to the result of the PC simulation with floating-point arithmetic. In this paper, we proposed a method to use a fixed-point DSP and a procedure for developing a real-time speech codec using DSPs and finally developed a G.723.l speech codec for ADSP-2181.