Voice control software consumes less than 1μW of power

Sensory's TrulyHandsfree voice control technology is extremely robust to noise and designed to prevent false triggers during normal room noise and conversations. The solution offers multiple phrase technology that recognises, analyses and responds to dozens of keywords. The technology consistently recognises phrases even when embedded in sentences and surrounded by noise, operating reliably in close to 0dB signal-to-noise ratio real-world environments. Traditional approaches to keyword spotting have failed in high noise and frequently false-fire, but TrulyHandsfree can deliver more than 95% accuracy without false fires even in high noise and speech. Ultra-low power consumption in detection and recognition modes extends battery life for always-on IoT and wearable devices. Both fixed triggers with user enrollment and user-defined triggers provide better performance and allow for personalisation. 

The DesignWare ARC EM DSP family of processors, which includes the EM5D and EM7D processors, implements a scalable pipeline that offers an optimal balance of performance, power consumption and size for a range of control and DSP applications. The processors include a unified, single-cycle 32x32 MUL/MAC unit with 32-bit/64-bit accumulators. To deliver enhanced performance for filtering, FFT and other signal processing algorithms, the EM5D and EM7D feature fractional support, rounding and non-rounding instructions, as well as divide, square root and fixed-point math functions. Vector and SIMD support provides greater processor efficiency by enabling multiple data values to be processed in a single operation, providing the DSP performance required for ultra-low power, always-on devices that process audio, voice and sensor data. These processors deliver excellent performance efficiency of up to 1.77DMIPS/MHz while consuming as little as 3.5μW/MHz dynamic power in a typical 28-nm HPM process technology. Like all ARC processors, the EM5D and EM7D are highly configurable so that each instance can be tailored to achieve the optimum balance of DSP and RISC performance for the target application as well as power and area efficiency. APEX technology offers designers the ability to create user-defined instructions, enabling the integration of custom hardware accelerators that improve application-specific performance while reducing power consumption and the amount of memory required.

"The trend towards greater numbers of voice-enabled IoT devices is driving the need for integrated hardware and software solutions that can deliver excellent performance while keeping power consumption at a minimum to extend battery life," said Bernard Brafman, Vice President, Business Development, Sensory. "By optimising Sensory's ultra-low power TrulyHandsfree technology for the highly efficient DesignWare ARC EM5D processor, we are providing designers with the ability to implement highly accurate voice activation capabilities within the stringent power and performance parameters of their designs."

"Consumer and IoT devices with voice activation capabilities are becoming ubiquitous and demand more sophisticated solutions that can deliver the required performance with very low power," said John Koeter, Vice President, Marketing, IP and Prototyping, Synopsys. "With the optimised port of Sensory's TrulyHandsfree voice control software for the ultra-low power ARC EM processors, we're helping designers integrate the broad range of voice detection and control features they need without compromising the battery life of their always-on applications."