An 8.3mW 1.6Msamples/s multi-modal event-driven speech enhancement processor for robust speech recognition in smart glasses

A low-power and high-speed speech enhancement processor for speech enhancement of noisy inputs is proposed to realize the robust speech recognition in smart glasses. It has 3 key schemes: multi-modal speech selection, look-up table based non-linear approximation circuits, and speech detection controlled dynamic clock gating. The multi-modal speech selection scheme uses three parameters to enhance the limited accuracy of the previous uni-modal user speech selection up to 98.1%. The non-linear function approximation circuit accelerates the throughput of the speech enhancement by 10.7×. The speech detection controlled clock gating reduces the redundant power consumption by 51% when there is no user voice. The proposed speech enhancement processor achieves 1.6Msamples/s throughput and 8.3mW average power consumption with the 98.1% true positive rate of speech selection in 65nm CMOS process.