A 22nm, 10.8 μ W/15.1 μ W Dual Computing Modes High Power-Performance-Area Efficiency Domained Background Noise Aware Keyword- Spotting Processor

Abstract

This paper proposes a high power-performance-area efficient background noise aware keyword-spotting (KWS) processor based on an optimized binarized weight network (BWN). To reduce the power consumption while maintaining the system recognition accuracy for different background noise, the KWS processor with a SNR prediction module can be adaptively configured to use dual computing modes (standard computing mode and approximate computing mode) for both high recognition accuracy under high background noise and ultra-low power consumption under low background noise. The mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) module is optimized with approximate computing technologies, which can reduce the power consumption by up to $3.1\times $ and $5.7\times $ for high/low background noise, respectively. Based on the evaluation of the architecture design space exploration, an ultra-low power BWN accelerator with low voltage, area and leakage power and using precision self-adaptive approximate computing units was proposed. Evaluated under 22nm process technology, this work can support up to 10 keywords real time recognition with power consumption of $15.1~\mu \text{W}$ for high background noise and $10.8~\mu \text{W}$ for low background noise. Compared to the state-of-the-art KWS architectures, our work can achieve ultra-low power consumption (about $1.7\times $ reduced), while maintaining high system capability and adaptability.