4aAB3. The adaptive silicon cochlea.

Session: Thursday Morning, December 4


Author: Rahul Sarpeshkar
Location: Bell Labs., Dept. of Biological Computation, Rm. 3L-404, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974, rahul@physics.bell-labs.com

Abstract:

Low-power wide-dynamic-range systems are extremely hard to build. The biological cochlea is one of the most awesome examples of such a system: It can sense sounds over 12 orders of magnitude in intensity, with an estimated power dissipation of only a few tens of microwatts. An analog electronic cochlea that processes sounds over six orders of magnitude in intensity, while dissipating less than 0.5 mW, is described. This 117-stage, 100-Hz to 10-KHz cochlea has the widest dynamic range of any artificial cochlea built to date. This design, using frequency-selective gain adaptation in a low-noise, traveling-wave amplifier architecture, yields insight into why the human cochlea uses a traveling-wave mechanism to sense sounds, instead of using bandpass filters.


ASA 134th Meeting - San Diego CA, December 1997