Adaptive optics system requires the high calculation capability and high real-time capability of wavefront processor. In view of the requirements,a new method for real-time adaptive optical wavefront processor based on systolic array is proposed. The method maps wavrfront gradient calculation,wavrfront reconstruction and wavefront control calculation to systolic array respectively in order to build the deep pipelines of data reasonably. Meanwhile,the latency of the wavefront processor based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) technology is analyzed. A 61-element 48 sub-aperture adaptive optical system has been implemented using a Xilinx Virtex-Ⅱ XC2V3000 FPGA. Experimental results indicate that the latency is only 8.6μs. As a result,the method can greatly increase the wavefront processor real-time performance,integration level,expansibility and general-purpose character.