Design Space Exploration Framework for Tensilica-Based Digital Audio Processors in Hearing Aids
Jens Karrenbauer, Lukas Gerlach, Guillermo Payá Vayá, Holger Blume · 2020
Choosing a suitable processor architecture for a hearing aid is a difficult task. Various aspects have to be taken into account, like power consumption and silicon area. Also, the computational performance and flexibility of an architecture are essential. Therefore, a wide variety of design goals must be weighted against each other before a final decision for the architecture can be made. In this paper, several configurable audio processors are evaluated, using five commonly known acoustic beamforming algorithms. In order to reduce the exploration time, this paper presents a partly automated design space exploration framework. The hearing aid algorithms are implemented in fixed-point representation to reduce the computational complexity. This framework includes a fixed-point analysis and an automated reference code generation using MATLAB tools. With the Xtensa Xplorer, different configurations of the Tensilica-based processor architecture are profiled. Finally, a case study is presented to show the usability of the proposed framework.