A novel cochlear model based on the nonlinear dynamics of an asynchronous cellular automaton is presented. Theoretical bifurcation analyses show that the model can mimic a nonlinear vector field of a differential equation cochlea model. It is then shown that the presented model can reproduce biologically measured frequency tuning curves of multiple species. In addition, the presented model is implemented in a field programmable gate array and experiments validate reproductions of the biological tuning curves. It is also shown that the presented model can be implemented by fewer hardware resources as compared to the differential equation cochlea model.