A silicon cochlea with active coupling.

We present a mixed-signal very-large-scale-integrated chip that emulates nonlinear active cochlear signal processing. Modeling the cochlea's micromechanics, including outer hair cell (OHC) electromotility, this silicon (Si) cochlea features active coupling between neighboring basilar membrane (BM) segments-a first. Neighboring BM segments, each implemented as a class AB log-domain second-order section, exchange currents representing OHC forces. This novel active-coupling architecture overcomes the major shortcomings of existing cascade and parallel filter-bank architectures, while achieving the highest number of digital outputs in an Si cochlea to date. An active-coupling architecture Si cochlea with 360 frequency channels and 2160 pulse-stream outputs occupies 10.9 mm(2) in a five-metal 1-poly 0.25-mum CMOS process. The chip's responses resemble that of a living cochlea's: Frequency responses become larger and more sharply tuned when active coupling is turned on. For instance, gain increases by 18 dB and Q 10 increases from 0.45 to 1.14. This enhancement decreases with increasing input intensity, realizing frequency-selective automatic gain control. Further work is required to improve performance by reducing large variations from tap to tap.