Design of a low-cost embedded iris recognition system is described in this paper. Firstly, we develop a simple and effective iris image acquisition unit, which is cheap and easy to use. This is achieved by both of hardware design and image evaluation algorithm development. Secondly, the iris recognition algorithm is introduced, including iris segmentation, image normalization, feature extraction, and code matching. The algorithm implementation architecture is based on an embedded dual-core processor platform, Texas Instruments TMS320DM6446 evaluation module (Davinci), which contains an ARM core and a DSP core in one chip. Thirdly, the evaluation experiments are performed on the established iris database, and the experimental results suggest that the system shows good performance both on accuracy and efficiency.