About a decade ago, a bit-serial parallel processing system STARAN 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 led to the recent development of two bit-serial parallel processing systems: an airborne associative processor and a ground based massively parallel processor. The airborne associative processor has about the same processing capability as a three cabinet STARAN system in a volume less than 0.5 cubic feet. The power required and weight are also reduced dramatically for the airborne environment.

The massively parallel processor has about 100 times the processing capability as the STARAN 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 integers 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.