Parallel processing for computer control

This chapter presents parallel processing for computer control. The use of general purpose microprocessors in direct digital control is very beneficial, so adopted in many wide and varied applications. These early microprocessors were rather primitive; they were 8-bit machines working with clock rates of the order of 1 MHz and possessed little software support usually the programming had to be performed in the assembly language. The situation is somewhat better now. The capabilities of electronic chip manufacturers have evolved to the stage where very large scale integration (VLSI) is possible and 32-bit microprocessors working at 25 MHz are commonly available; such modern microprocessors are powerful computing devices, which are able to perform many millions of instructions every second. In addition, they can also have on-chip floating-point support and are able to be programmed in standard high-level languages.