Lateral coupling in silicon cochlear models

Drawing inspiration from biological studies, we have developed a novel silicon cochlea model which better accounts for the effect of local fluid coupling on the basilar membrane. This fluid coupling is emulated by coupling an extra wideband filter to each narrowband filter in the array. In this paper we present some of the biological background and give a short survey of earlier silicon cochlea models. We then briefly discuss the bandpass-filter element used in the circuit before presenting our silicon cochlea model along with measurements of the performance of a single filter tap.