A sample rate converter(SRC) is designed to adjust the sampling rate of digital signals flexibly for different application requirements in the broadband signal processing system. In this paper, a novel parallel-serial structure is proposed to improve the bandwidth and flexibility of SRC. The core of this structure is a parallel decimation filter followed by a serial counterpart, the parallel part is designed to process high sampling rate data streams, and the serial part provides high flexibility in decimation factor configuration. A typical combination of cascaded integral comb filter(CIC) and halfband filter is utilized in this structure, the serial recursive loop which limits the processing ability of the CIC filter is transformed into a parallel-pipeline recursive structure. In addition, the symmetry property and zero coefficient of the halfband filter are exploited with the polyphase filter structure to reduce resource utilization and design complexity. In the meantime, the decimation factor of the CIC filter can be adjusted flexibly in a wide range, which is used to improve the system configuration flexibility. This parallel-serial SRC structure was implemented on Xilinx KU115 series field programmable gate array(FPGA), and then applied in a synthetic instrument system. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of SRC in bandwidth and flexibility.