An Application-Specific Low Power Speech Processor for Cochlear Implants

Fully implantable cochlear prostheses are considered as next generation products, in which low power speech processors are very crucial. This paper reports a digital speech processor dedicated to cochlear prostheses. It is a programmable platform and able to carry out all kinds of speech processing algorithms. Several application-specific low power techniques including algorithm optimization, wait mode, operand isolation, clock gating, loop cache and memory partitioning are introduced in the processor design. Implemented using 0.18 mu m CMOS technology, the processor prototype consumes about 2.3mW when executing the continuous-interleaved-sampling (CIS) algorithm at a clock frequency of 10MHz.