Rapid advances in neural sciences and VLSI design technologies have provided an excellent means to boost the computational capability and efficiency of data and signal processing tasks by several orders of magnitude. With massively parallel processing capabilities, artificial neural networks can be used to solve many engineering and scientific problems. Due to the optimized data communication structure for artificial intelligence applications, a neurocomputer is considered as the most promising sixth-generation computing machine. Typical applica- tions of artificial neural networks include...