A small analog VLSI inner hair cell model

In this paper we present a simplified analog VLSI inner hair cell model, which models the main characteristics of the biological inner hair cell, i.e. (1) soft half-wave rectification, (2) low-pass filtering at 1 kHz, and (3) adaptation to sustained input. The main challenge lies in the creation of the long time constant associated with the 1 kHz low-pass filter and the adaptation. A modified current mirror structure has been used to create a nonlinear low-pass filter which has a cut-off frequency of 1 kHz or lower with reasonable component and bias values. Comparison of measurements of the biological inner hair cell and the circuit show a good agreement between the two.