A micropower switched capacitor implementation of the silicon cochlea

This paper presents the implementation in micropower technique of a switched capacitor (SC) silicon cochlea. Its main features are: very low power consumption, enhanced behaviour compared to previous realizations and a true integrability inside a real hearing prosthesis. The silicon cochlea is based on a cascade of 40 programmable SC second order low-pass filters and achieves a power consumption of less than 100 μW with a supply of 3V and a sampling frequency (Fs = 1/T) of 200 KHz.