Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become a viable alternative to other implementation platforms of the increasingly popular discrete wavelet transform. The transform is computationally intensive, and thus it required fast, real-time and efficient implementation. In this paper, a real time parallel implementation of the discrete wavelet transform is presented. The implementation is based on one of the largest FPGA devices in industry; the Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. Performance results of the implementation are presented and compared with results obtained for alternative FPGA and software implementation. The implementation is simple, scalable and performs both the forward and inverse discrete wavelet transforms.