High performance continuous variable bandwidth digital filter design for hearing aid application

Abstract

A low complexity, low delay reconfigurable digital filter structure for hearing aids is proposed in this paper. The main objective is to match a given human audiogram, with minimum error. The high computational complexity in the conventional uniform and non-uniform filter bank techniques, probes to shift the design paradigm towards variable filter structure. In this paper, Farrow structure based design is used to realize an arbitrary sample rate converter, making use of a differentiator based model, by which the bandwidth can be continuously varied. The proposed design also considers the importance of the power, area, and” delay in such a critical scenario. Exhaustive comparisons are performed with the existing literature on audiogram matching, and our design is very competitive when compared to the designs in the literature, not only with respect to the matching error but also with respect to area, power dissipation, and hardware complexity.