A general-purpose serial operation pipeline realizes a complicated
processing flow with an extemporaneous and explosive amount of operations
with respect to various data sizes. A plurality of arithmetic-logic
circuits (SALCs) that are controlled individually, and that can be
operated together with another arithmetic-logic circuit (SALC) are
connected in a cascade manner to form a serial operation pipeline. At
least one of the plural SALCs includes a line for outputting data from an
upstream SALC to a downstream SALC, a line for feeding back reverse data
from the downstream SALC to the upstream SALC, and latch circuits for
latching the data on the respective lines, thereby being capable of
feeding back data from an arbitrary SALC to another SALC.