A structured light 3D measurement system architecture consisting of three heterogeneous cores is proposed based on phase-shift profilometry to achieve an embedded 3D measurement system for efficiency, integration, versatility, and flexibility. The multi-core heterogeneous architecture has a clear hierarchy, flexible structure, and strong universality and can work with optical devices (cameras, projectors, etc.) possessing a variety of universal interfaces. A full process-structured light 3D measurement system covering phase demodulation, unwrapping, and phase depth mapping modules is designed and constructed based on this architecture along with the parallel pipelining optimization approach of the field-programmable gate array. The experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly enhances the measurement efficiency, it only takes 12 ms to process 13 images of 1280×800 resolution when the measurement accuracy is equivalent, which is 11 times that of similar algorithms on standard PC platforms.