Foto 7

Gabriele Meoni, Luca Pilato, Gabriele Ciarpi, Alessandro Palla, Luca Fanucci: "Fully Digital Low-Power Implementation of an Audio Front-End for Portable Applications", APPLEPIES Conference, 26 - 27 September 2018, Pisa (Italy)

Written by

This work presents a fully digital implementation of an audio front-end 
for portable applications developed in a low-power perspective.
Such platform acquires audio samples through a four digital Pulse Digital Modulation (PDM) microphones array and
implements two-channel (left and right) beamformers to perform speech enhancement. 
The system also features a low-power Voice Activity Detector (VAD) for the implementation of source localization or noise reduction algorithms.
Finally, the processed data can be converted into a 16-bit resolution Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) format and then transmitted through a standard Integrated Interchip Sound (I2S) interface.
The front-end has been implemented onboard a Microsemi IGLOO nano Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), reaching a power consumption of only 2.264 mW. The low-power architecture and the implemented functionalities make the system a promising front-end for audio speech portable applications.

 

Keyword: {low-power digital audio front-end ,low-power FPGA, Digital Signal Processing, Audio Beamforming, Voice Activity Detector}