321 research outputs found
In-Ear-Voice: Towards Milli-Watt Audio Enhancement With Bone-Conduction Microphones for In-Ear Sensing Platforms
The recent ubiquitous adoption of remote conferencing has been accompanied by
omnipresent frustration with distorted or otherwise unclear voice
communication. Audio enhancement can compensate for low-quality input signals
from, for example, small true wireless earbuds, by applying noise suppression
techniques. Such processing relies on voice activity detection (VAD) with low
latency and the added capability of discriminating the wearer's voice from
others - a task of significant computational complexity. The tight energy
budget of devices as small as modern earphones, however, requires any system
attempting to tackle this problem to do so with minimal power and processing
overhead, while not relying on speaker-specific voice samples and training due
to usability concerns.
This paper presents the design and implementation of a custom research
platform for low-power wireless earbuds based on novel, commercial, MEMS
bone-conduction microphones. Such microphones can record the wearer's speech
with much greater isolation, enabling personalized voice activity detection and
further audio enhancement applications. Furthermore, the paper accurately
evaluates a proposed low-power personalized speech detection algorithm based on
bone conduction data and a recurrent neural network running on the implemented
research platform. This algorithm is compared to an approach based on
traditional microphone input. The performance of the bone conduction system,
achieving detection of speech within 12.8ms at an accuracy of 95\% is
evaluated. Different SoC choices are contrasted, with the final implementation
based on the cutting-edge Ambiq Apollo 4 Blue SoC achieving 2.64mW average
power consumption at 14uJ per inference, reaching 43h of battery life on a
miniature 32mAh li-ion cell and without duty cycling
AutonomROS: A ReconROS-based Autonomonous Driving Unit
Autonomous driving has become an important research area in recent years, and
the corresponding system creates an enormous demand for computations.
Heterogeneous computing platforms such as systems-on-chip that combine CPUs
with reprogrammable hardware offer both computational performance and
flexibility and are thus interesting targets for autonomous driving
architectures. The de-facto software architecture standard in robotics,
including autonomous driving systems, is ROS 2. ReconROS is a framework for
creating robotics applications that extends ROS 2 with the possibility of
mapping compute-intense functions to hardware.
This paper presents AutonomROS, an autonomous driving unit based on the
ReconROS framework. AutonomROS serves as a blueprint for a larger robotics
application developed with ReconROS and demonstrates its suitability and
extendability. The application integrates the ROS 2 package Navigation 2 with
custom-developed software and hardware-accelerated functions for point cloud
generation, obstacle detection, and lane detection. In addition, we detail a
new communication middleware for shared memory communication between software
and hardware functions. We evaluate AutonomROS and show the advantage of
hardware acceleration and the new communication middleware for improving
turnaround times, achievable frame rates, and, most importantly, reducing CPU
load
From serendipity to sustainable Green IoT: technical, industrial and political perspective
Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the largest electronics market for hardware production due to its fast evolving application space. However, one of the key challenges for IoT hardware is the energy efficiency as most of IoT devices/objects are expected to run on batteries for months/years without a battery replacement or on harvested energy sources. Widespread use of IoT has also led to a largescale rise in the carbon footprint. In this regard, academia, industry and policy-makers are constantly working towards new energy-efficient hardware and software solutions paving the way for an emerging area referred to as green-IoT. With the direct integration and the evolution of smart communication between physical world and computer-based systems, IoT devices are also expected to reduce the total amount of energy consumption for the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector.
However, in order to increase its chance of success and to help at reducing the overall energy consumption and carbon emissions a comprehensive investigation into how to achieve green-IoT is required. In this context, this paper surveys the green perspective of the IoT paradigm and aims to contribute at establishing a global approach for green-IoT environments. A comprehensive approach is presented that focuses not only on the specific solutions but also on the interaction among them, and highlights the precautions/decisions the policy makers need to take. On one side, the ongoing European projects and standardization efforts as well as industry and academia based solutions are presented and on the other side, the challenges, open issues, lessons learned and the role of policymakers towards green-IoT are discussed.
The survey shows that due to many existing open issues (e.g., technical considerations, lack of standardization, security and privacy, governance and legislation, etc.) that still need to be addressed, a realistic implementation of a sustainable green-IoT environment that could be universally accepted and deployed, is still missing
A survey of system level power management schemes in the dark-silicon era for many-core architectures
Power consumption in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology has escalated to a point that only a fractional part of many-core chips can be powered-on at a time. Fortunately, this fraction can be increased at the expense of performance through the dark-silicon solution. However, with many-core integration set to be heading towards its thousands, power consumption and temperature increases per time, meaning the number of active nodes must be reduced drastically. Therefore, optimized techniques are demanded for continuous advancement in technology. Existing efforts try to overcome this challenge by activating nodes from different parts of the chip at the expense of communication latency. Other efforts on the other hand employ run-time power management techniques to manage the power performance of the cores trading-off performance for power. We found out that, for a significant amount of power to saved and high temperature to be avoided, focus should be on reducing the power consumption of all the on-chip components. Especially, the memory hierarchy and the interconnect. Power consumption can be minimized by, reducing the size of high leakage power dissipating elements, turning-off idle resources and integrating power saving materials
Holistic security 4.0
The future computer climate will represent an ever more aligned world of integrating
technologies, affecting consumer, business and industry sectors. The vision was first outlined
in the Industry 4.0 conception. The elements which comprise smart systems or embedded
devices have been investigated to determine the technological climate.
The emerging technologies revolve around core concepts, and specifically in this project, the
uses of Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Internet of Everything
(IoE). The application of bare metal and logical technology qualities are put under the
microscope to provide an effective blue print of the technological field.
The systems and governance surrounding smart systems are also examined. Such an approach
helps to explain the beneficial or negative elements of smart devices. Consequently, this
ensures a comprehensive review of standards, laws, policy and guidance to enable security and
cybersecurity of the 4.0 systems
NoCs:a Short History of Success and a Long Future
The broad application of NoCs in IC design has been enabled by NoC synthesis tools that evolved from university prototypes to full commercial synthesis flows. NoC embodiments are ubiquitously present in circuits and systems. As systems evolve to include new components and features, NoCs will play even a more important role as the smart connect that can enable heterogeneity. Thus this field will both evolve in diversity of implementations as well in the search of both higher performance and lower power solutions
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