We analyze the behavior of a well-known class of analog adaptive filters in which all the multipliers are replaced by nonideal multipliers for which the linearity requirement with respect to one of the inputs is relaxed. Applications of these filters have been proposed in many different engineering contexts which have in common the following idealized problem: a system has a vector input x
tand a scalar output

, where

is an unknown lime-invariant coefficient vector. From a knowledge of x
tand z
tit is required to estimate

. The estimate vector is

where h
tis generated in the filter as the solution of a differential equation and

is a nonlinear map defined by the characteristics of the nonideal multipliers. The effectiveness of the filter is determined by the convergence properties of the misalignment vector,

. With a weak nondegeneracy requirement on x
t, the "mixing condition," we prove the exponential convergence of

. Considerable emphasis is placed on the analysis of the effects of various important departures from the idealized problem as when noise is present, the coefficient vector

is time varying, etc. The results show that in every important aspect the qualitative behavior is similar to that of the conventional filter in which ideal multipliers are used. However, new techniques are required for the analysis of this inherently nonlinear system.