A multi-channel formant speech synthesis system

The design and implementation of multi-channel formant speech synthesis system is described. The aim of the research was to develop a system capable of producing up to eight channels of high quality synthetic speech, concurrently. The signal processing bandwidth necessary to achieve this goal required the design and implementation of a custom application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) which performed the signal processing functions associated with a formant speech synthesis algorithm. A description is also presented of the synthesis system and the ASIC architecture developed to implement the formant synthesis functions and to achieve the design goals. A fully synchronous bit-serial signal processing architecture is described which is used to implement the synthesis functions, and it is shown how the increased signal processing bandwidth available from this approach can be utilized to achieves multi-channel synthesis operation