Comunicación presentada al "CSCC'99" celebrado en Atenas en Julio de 1999.Several VLSI realizations of fuzzy systems have been proposed in the literature in the recent years. They employ analog or digital circuitry, offering more or less programmability, implementing different inference methods, with different types of membership functions as well as different antecedents’ connectives. This paper centers this wide design space by fixing several parameters that allow efficient VLSI implementations of programmable fuzzy systems featuring first, second and third order accurate approximation. Hardware requirements are discussed and compared from the point of view of approximation capability or precision, thus attempting to a formalization that has never been applied before to the field of fuzzy hardware.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish CICYT Project TIC98-0869.Peer reviewed