The neural engine (20) is a hardware implementation of a neural network for use in real-time systems. The neural engine (20) includes a control circuit (26) and one or more multiply/accumulate circuit (28) includes a parallel/serial arrangement of multiple multiplier/accumulators interconnected with weight storage elements to yield multiple neural weightings and sums in a single clock cycle. A neural processing language is used to program the neural engine (20) through a conventional host personal computer (22). The parallel processing permits very high processing speeds to permit real-time pattern classification capability.
