A cochlear filter implemented with a field-programmable gate array

A digital cochlear filter was designed and implemented in hardware using a Xilinx XC4010 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. The filter gives a good fit to biological data. It is a tenth-order recursive filter implemented as a parallel combination of low-order elements. A systematic approach to the design problem enabled us to achieve a good fit to cochlear data with efficiency of hardware usage. This approach can be easily extended to other similar applications.