Flexibility, high computing power and low energy consumption are strong guidelines when designing new generation embedded processors. Traditional architectures are no longer suitable to provide a good compromise among these contradictory implementation requirements. In this paper we present a new reconfigurable processor that tightly couples a VLIW architecture with a configurable unit implementing an additional configurable pipeline. A software development environment is also introduced providing a user-friendly tool for application development and performance simulation. Finally, we show that the HW/SW reconfigurable platform proposed achieves dramatic improvement in both speed and energy consumption on signal processing computation kernels.