Studies on the stability of the equilibrium points of continuous bidirectional associative memory (BAM) neural network have yielded many useful results. A novel neural network model called standard neural network model (SNNM) is advanced. By using state affine transformation, the BAM neural networks were converted to SNNMs. Some sufficient conditions for the global asymptotic stability of continuous BAM neural networks were derived from studies on the SNNMs stability. These conditions were formulated as easily verifiable linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), whose conservativeness is relatively low. The approach proposed extends the known stability results, and can also be applied to other forms of recurrent neural networks (RNNs).