Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2003-05-01

Filename

wucse-2003-35.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCSE-2003-35

Abstract

We investigate the impact of numerical representation on the power consumption of digital hearing aids. A fundamental building block, a non-linear amplifier, is implemented using traditional 16-bit linear or customized 9-bit logarithmic and 10-bit floating point numerical representations. An individual channel of a multi-channel hearing aid is constructed, targeting both FPGA and ASIC deployment options. Using signal transition counts in the post-synthesis simulation to model power consumption, we compare the relative power consumption of the non-linear amplifiers, a full hearing aid channel, and the complete hearing aid signal processing for these three numerical representations. Our results show that for the non-linear amplifier, the logarithmic and floating-point representations provide significant savings over a traditional linear representation. However, since the total power consumption is dominated by the FIR filters, the total power saving is on the order of the filters.

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7T72FSJ

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