A 2-D silicon cochlea with an improved automatic quality factor control-loop

In this paper we present a 2-D silicon cochlea which includes an automatic quality factor control (AQC) loop. This control-loop is an improved version of that presented in [1] where the control-loop imposes both a ceiling and a threshold level on the output amplitude of the basilar membrane (BM) resonators. In this improved version we include only a single set-point in our control-loop. This allows us to tune the BM resonators close to a Hopf bifurcation. We present test results from a fabricated integrated circuit which, when compared with biological data, demonstrates the feasibility of our active 2-D cochlea model.