Computational Intelligence and its applications have been under dynamic development in the last years. The research areas as fuzzy logic, neural networks or evolutionary computation have demonstrated their power on a large amount of problems, e.g. in pattern recognition, system control, system diagnosis, and intelligent signal processing. We give a short review of the developments in this area over the last years. We show here that a developer of dedicated hardware should be aware of the problems in developing specialized hardware for computational intelligence, i.e. he has to compete with main stream microcomputer implementations of the same techniques. Furthermore we point out some directions for promising research and possibilities for system improvements, especially in the area of neural network algorithm and system research.