An ultra low-power peak-instant detector for a peak picking cochlear implant processor

This paper presents the design of a sub-threshold CMOS peak-instant detector to be used in a phase-locking peak-picking (PL-PP) bionic ear (BE) processor. The detector is formed by a current sample and hold circuit and a voltage comparator to perform the detection of occurrences of maximum and minimum values of the input. Circuit simulation results using CMOS 0.35 μm AMIS technology confirm that the proposed detector can be operated from a 1.2 V supply and consumes less than 1μW static power for detecting a 5kHz input signal (maximum frequency of the processor). For lower input frequencies the power consumption can be scaled down to further reduce the BE processor's power consumption.