Design and Implementation of Low-Power ANSI S1.11 Filter Bank for Digital Hearing Aids

Due to well matching the frequency characteristics of human ears, ANSI S1.11 1/3-octave filter bank is popular in acoustic applications, such as acoustic analyzers and equalizers. It is also desirable in hearing aids because the famous hearing aid prescription formula, NAL-NL1, prescribes its gains at ANSI 1/3-octave frequencies. However, the high computation complexity limits its usage, in which the power consumption is a critical concern. To address this issue, a low-power design and implementation of ANSI S1.11 filter bank for digital hearing aids is present. We first develop the complexity-effective multirate FIR filter bank algorithm. And, a systematic coefficient design flow is elaborated for the proposed filter bank to minimize the order of the FIR filter thereof. In an 18-band digital hearing aid with 24-kHz sampling rate, the proposed algorithm saves about 96% of multiplications and additions, comparing that with a straightforward FIR filter bank. Moreover, various low-power VLSI design techniques are investigated in detail and applied on our design. The proposed complexity-effective ANSI S1.11 FIR filter bank has been implemented in the TSMC 0.13-μ m CMOS technology with an area-efficient architecture. The test chip consumes only 87 μW, which is 30%-79% of that of the others available in the literature. The proposed low-power ANSI 1/3-octave bank makes itself being able to precisely apply the prescribed gains obtained by NAL-NL1 prescription formula for hearing-impaired people.