An analogue VLSI model of periodicity extraction in the human auditory system

This paper presents an electronic system that extracts the periodicity of a sound. It uses three analogue VLSI building blocks: a silicon cochlea, two inner-hair-cell circuits and two spiking neuron chips. The silicon cochlea consists of a cascade of filter sections that filter the input sound. The system uses correlation between two spike trains created from different outputs of the silicon cochlea to obtain very selective filters, i.e., filters that respond only to a very narrow range of periodicities, but that at the same time still respond quickly. This is an advantage over traditional band-pass filters, where an increase in selectivity has to be traded off against a decrease in response time