An improvement of chip design for auditory source localization awareness

Sound localization or direction of arrival (DOA) estimation plays a key role in awareness technologies since it can identify the coordinates of an unknown source. In this study, we present a new chip design, which is primarily based on the average magnitude difference function (AMDF), for reducing the hardware area and power consumption. Meanwhile, two novel hardware architectures with the folded architecture and circular buffer are also proposed in order to save unnecessary computation in this system, including short critical paths and simply control units of data access. The experimental results show that our proposed design can successfully enhance the operating frequency and reach higher performance. Furthermore, the accuracy rate of our system can achieve 90% with ±3° errors on average. The chip simulation result displays that the power consumption is approximately 1.3 mW, and the chip area is 0.998 mm² with 0.18-μm CMOS process.