The present invention relates to microprocessor shifter circuits utilizing butterfly and inverse butterfly circuits, and control circuits therefor. The shifter circuits can be implemented in existing microprocessors, and allow for complex bit manipulations to be performed by such microprocessors at high speeds. The shifter circuits can perform butterfly and inverse butterfly operations, parallel extract and parallel deposit operations, group operations, mix operations, bit permutation operations, as well as instructions executed by existing microprocessors. The shifter circuits can replace existing shifter circuits in microprocessors, so as to provide new ways for conducting existing shift, rotate, extract, deposit, and mix operations, as well as more advanced bit manipulation instructions. The shifter circuits can be implemented with a reduced amount of circuitry, thus conserving chip space. User applications relating to steganography, binary image morphology, transfer coding, bioinformatics, imaging, and integer compression techniques, among other applications, can be implemented using the shifter circuits of the present invention. The shifter circuits can be provided in various combinations to provide microprocessor functional units which perform a plurality of bit manipulation processes.