A Silicon Model of an Auditory Neural Representation of Spectral Shape

The paper describes an analog integrated circuit that implements an auditory neural representation of spectral shape. The circuit contains silicon models of the cochlea, inner hair cells, spiral ganglion cells, and the neurons that compute an amplitude-invariant representation of spectral shape. The chip uses the temporal information in each silicon auditory-nerve fiber to compute this final representation. The chip was fabricated and fully tested; the paper includes data comparing the silicon auditory-nerve representation and the final representation. The 9000 transistor chip computes all outputs in real time using analog continuous-time processing.