According to the equipment development trend of the rapid formation of new technologies and new capabilities, the composition and architecture design requirements of unmanned surface vehicle (USV) system are analyzed. The principles and objectives of USV system design are clarified, and the technical route, construction steps, hierarchical functional domain architecture design and common interface design reference specifications of USV architecture design are proposed. The effectiveness of the overall architecture design is proved by the real boat test. The results show that the system architecture design can effectively shorten the development and deployment time of the new mission capability of the USV.