FPGA implementation of a neuromimetic cochlea for a bionic bat head

The implementation of a neuromimetic bat model is presented in this paper. In particular the use of an FPGA to perform high performance multichannel frequency filtering is described. Since many applications in auditory modelling require implementation of filter banks that model the characteristics of psychophysical signals, the paper focuses on an FPGA implementation of the digital filters in the neuromimetic cochlear. The paper presents an efficient hardware realization of a number of IIR Butterworth bandpass filters. The pipelined parallel filter architecture is implemented on a single Xilinx Virtex II FPGA chip running in real time.