A low-power acoustic periodicity detector chip for voice and engine detection

The detection of voices or the rumble of engines is a desirable function in many different devices from toys to smart homes to military applications. Typical approaches involving frequency-domain computation are quite computationally intensive and require a significant power and computational budget. In an effort to construct a very low-power detector capable of acting as a wake-up signal for other systems, we have designed a simple, low-power (1.5 μW) analog VLSI circuit that detects periodicity in the time-domain envelope of the acoustic signal. The circuit was fabricated in a commercially 1.5 μm available CMOS process.