This paper presents the design of a CMOS cochlea filter channel which achieves high tunability, sharp stopband cutoff and low power consumption with the use of floating active inductor (FAI) as the basic building block. Simulation results show that over 40dB of gain enhancement together with 20% frequency tuning can be achieved at the same time by adjusting only one circuit parameter. A fifth-order elliptic filter providing a stop-band slope of 65.4 ∼ 139.8 dB/octave is used as the last stage of the cochlea filter. The power consumption of the cochlea filter channel is 86μW.