2019/05/06 by Minhao Yang, Chung-Heng Yeh, Yiyin Zhou +4 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Speech and Audio Processing #Blind Source Separation Techniques #Music and Audio Processing
paper · doi:10.1109/jssc.2019.2894360
This paper presents an ultra-low-power voice activity detector (VAD). It uses analog signal processing for acoustic feature extraction (AFE) directly on the microphone output, approximate event-driven analog-to-digital conversion (ED-ADC), and digital deep neural network (DNN) for speech/non-speech classification. New circuits, including the low-noise amplifier, bandpass filter, and full-wave rectifier contribute to the more than 9× normalized power/channel reduction in the feature extraction front-end compared to the best prior art. The digital DNN is a three-hidden-layer binarized multilayer perceptron (MLP) with a 2-neuron output layer and a 48-neuron input layer that receives parallel event streams from the EDADCs. To obtain the DNN weights via off-line training, a customized front-end model written in python is constructed to accelerate feature generation in software emulation, and the model parameters are extracted from Spectre simulations. The chip, fabricated in 0.18-μm CMOS, has a core area of 1.66 × 1.52 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and consumes 1 μW. The classification measurements using the 1-hour 10-dB signal-to-noise ratio audio with restaurant background noise show a mean speech/non-speech hit rate of 84.4%/85.4% with a 1.88%/4.65% 1-σ variation across ten dies that are all loaded with the same weights.