A power-efficient circuit design of feed-forward FxLMS active noise cancellation for in-ear headphones

Conventional active noise cancelling (ANC) headphones perform well in reducing the low-frequency noise and isolate high-frequency noise by earmuffs passively. These systems often use high-speed digital signal processors (DSPs) to cancel out the disturbing noise at such low frequencies, which result in a high-power dissipation for a commercial ANC headphone. This paper proposes a high-performance feedforward ANC architecture and implements a high-performance low power circuit design accordingly based on the filtered-x least mean square (FxLMS) adaptive algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed high-performance circuit design can reduce disturbing noise of various frequency bands very well, and outperforms the existing works. After fabricating by using the TSMC 90nm CMOS technology, the proposed design can attenuate 15 dB for the broadband pink noise between 50-1500 Hz when operated at 10 MHz clock frequency at the costs of 84.2 k gates and power consumption of 6.42 mW only.