A 37-element solar adaptive optics system, which consists of a fine tracking loop with a tip/tilt mirror and a correlation tracker, and a high-order correction loop with a 37-element deformable mirror, a correlating Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and a real-time controller, was built and installed at the 26 cm solar fine structure telescope of the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory in 2009. In this system, the absolute difference algorithm is used. A new architecture with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and digital signal processor (DSP) for the real-time controller based on systolic array and pipeline was developed. The computational latencies of the fine tracking loop and high-order correction loop are about 35 and 100 mu s, respectively. The tracking residual root-mean-square error is less than 0.1 arcsec, and the wavefront residual root-mean-square error is about 0.05 wavelengths (lambda = 550 nm) after correction. The observational results show that the contrast and resolution of the solar images are improved after the correction by this adaptive optics system. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America