A 1-V, 1.2-mA fully integrated SoC for digital hearing aids. Issue 1 (January 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chen, Li-Ming; Yu, Zeng-Hui; Chen, Cheng-Ying; Hu, Xiao-Yu; Fan, Jun; Yang, Jun; Hei, Yong
• Is Part Of: Microelectronics journal. Volume 46:Issue 1(2015)
• Page Start: 12
• Page End: 19
• Publication Date: 2015-01
• Subjects: Microelectronics -- Periodicals; Microélectronique -- Périodiques; Microelectronics; Electronic journals; Journals - contents and abstracts; Periodicals; 621.3805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mejo.2014.09.013
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-8324

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="author" id="ab0005"> <title id="sect0005">Abstract</title> <sec> <p id="sp0105">Both power and size are very important design issues for hearing aids. This paper proposes a fully integrated low-power SoC for today׳s digital hearing aids. The SoC integrates all the audio processing elements on single chip, including the analog front-end, digital signal processing (DSP) platform and class-D amplifier. Also, the low-dropout voltage regulators and internal clock generator are both integrated to minimize the system overall size. The 24-bit DSP platform comprises an application-specific instruction-set processor and several dedicated accelerators to achieve a trade-off between flexibility and power efficiency. Three critical hearing-aid algorithms (wide dynamic range compression, noise reduction and feedback cancellation) are performed by the low-power accelerators. The proposed SoC has been fabricated in SMIC 130 nm CMOS technology. The measurement results show that the analog front-end has up to 88 dB signal-to-noise ratio. And the DSP platform consumes about 0.86 mA current at 8 MHz clock frequency when executing the three algorithms. The total current consumption of SoC is only 1.2 mA at 1 V supply. In addition, the acoustic test results indicate that the SoC is one promising candidate for hearing-aid manufacturers.</p> </sec> </abstract>