A 34.7 µW Speech Keyword Spotting IC Based on Subband Energy Feature Extraction

Abstract

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), voice control has enhanced human–machine interaction and the accuracy of keyword spotting (KWS) algorithms has reached 97%; however, the high power consumption of KWS algorithms caused by their huge computing and storage requirements has limited their application in Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) devices. In this study, voice features are extracted by utilizing the fast discrete cosine transform (FDCT) for frequency-domain transformation and to shorten the process of calculating the logarithmic spectrum and cepstrum. The designed KWS system is a two-stage wake-up system, with a sound detection (SD) awakening KWS. The inference process of the KWS network is achieved using time-division computation, reducing the KWS clock to an ultra-low frequency of 24 kHz.At the same time, the implementation of a depthwise separable convolution neural network (DSCNN) greatly reduces the parameter quantity and computation. Under the GSMC 0.11 µm technology, post-layout simulation results show that the total synthesized area of the entire system circuit is 0.58 mm2, the power consumption is 34.7 µW, and the F1-score of the KWS is 0.89 with 10 dB noise, which makes it suitable as a KWS system in AIoT devices.