About a decade ago, a bit-serial parallel processing system STARAN® 1 was developed. It used standard integrated circuits that were available at that time. Now, with the availability of VLSI, a much greater processing capability can be packed in a unit volume. This has Jed to the recent development of two bit-serial parallel pro cessing systems: an airborne associative processor and a ground based massively parallel processor. The airborne associative processor has about the same processing

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... bility as a three cabinet STARA N system in a volume less than 0.5 cubic feet. The power required and weight ' are also reduced dra matically for the airborne environment. The massively parallel processor has about 100 times tbe processing capability as tb~ STA RAN system in about the same volume. Floating point speeds are better than 100 MOPS (million operations per second). Integer arithmetic speeds depend on operand lengths-for 16 bit in tegers the speed is better than 3000 MOPS for addition and 450 MOPS for multiplication. After presenting the basic rationale for bit-serial parallel processors, the organizations of the two recent systems are shown and some of their applications are outlined. .