A novel ergodic cellular automaton cochlear model: reproduction of nonlinear sound processing functions of mammalian cochlea and efficient hardware implementation

In this paper, a novel hardware-efficient electronic circuit cochlear model, the dynamics of which are described by an ergodic cellular automaton, is presented. Based on theoretical and numerical analyses, a parameter setting method so that the presented model properly works as a cochlear model is proposed. It is shown that the presented cochlear model designed by the proposed parameter setting method can reproduce typical nonlinear sound processing functions of mammalian cochleae such as nonlinear compression and two-tone distortion products. Furthermore, the presented model is implemented by a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and its operations are validated by experiments. It is shown that the presented model is much more hardware-efficient (i.e., consumes many fewer circuits elements) compared to some other electronic circuit cochlear models.