It is a cascade of processing stages which are linearly connected to perform a fixed function over a stream of data flowing from one end to another.

Applied for instruction execution, arithmetic computation, and memory access operations .

A linear pipeline processor is constructed with k processing stages.  External input is supplied to the pipeline from stage S1.The processed result is passed from stage Si to stage Si+1,for all i=1,2..k-1. The final result is produced from the last pipeline stag.

Depending on the control of data flow along the pipeline, linear pipelines are model into two categories. Asynchronous and Synchronous Model.