Microphone arrays add an extra dimension to sensory information from Wireless Sensor Networks by determining the direction of the sound instead of only its intensity. Microphone arrays, however, need to be flexible enough to adapt their characteristics to realistic acoustic environments, while being power efficient, as they are battery-powered. Consequently, there is a clear need to design adaptable microphone array nodes enabling quality aware distributed sensing and prioritizing low power consumption. In this paper a novel dynamic, scalable and energy-efficient FPGA-based architecture is presented. The proposed architecture applies the Delay-and-Sum beamforming technique to the single-bit digital audio from the MEMS microphones to obtain the relative sound power in the time domain. As a result, the resource consumption is drastically reduced, making the proposed architecture suitable for low-power Flash-based FPGAs. In fact, the architecture{\textquoteright}s power consumption estimation can become as low as 649 μW per microphone.
Da Silva Gomez, B, Segers, L, Braeken, A, Steenhaut, K & Touhafi, A 2018, A Low-Power FPGA-Based Architecture for Microphone Arrays in Wireless Sensor Networks. in N Voros, G Keramidas, C Antonopoulos, M Huebner, PC Diniz & D Goehringer (eds), International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools, and Applications - 14th International Symposium, ARC 2018, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), vol. 10824 LNCS, pp. 281-293, International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, Fira, Greece, 2/05/18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78890-6_23
Da Silva Gomez, B., Segers, L., Braeken, A., Steenhaut, K., & Touhafi, A. (2018). A Low-Power FPGA-Based Architecture for Microphone Arrays in Wireless Sensor Networks. In N. Voros, G. Keramidas, C. Antonopoulos, M. Huebner, P. C. Diniz, & D. Goehringer (Eds.), International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools, and Applications - 14th International Symposium, ARC 2018, Proceedings (pp. 281-293). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 10824 LNCS). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78890-6_23
@inproceedings{13fcca41ffb9479dbc63f2851e6db89a,
title = "A Low-Power FPGA-Based Architecture for Microphone Arrays in Wireless Sensor Networks",
abstract = "Microphone arrays add an extra dimension to sensory information from Wireless Sensor Networks by determining the direction of the sound instead of only its intensity. Microphone arrays, however, need to be flexible enough to adapt their characteristics to realistic acoustic environments, while being power efficient, as they are battery-powered. Consequently, there is a clear need to design adaptable microphone array nodes enabling quality aware distributed sensing and prioritizing low power consumption. In this paper a novel dynamic, scalable and energy-efficient FPGA-based architecture is presented. The proposed architecture applies the Delay-and-Sum beamforming technique to the single-bit digital audio from the MEMS microphones to obtain the relative sound power in the time domain. As a result, the resource consumption is drastically reduced, making the proposed architecture suitable for low-power Flash-based FPGAs. In fact, the architecture{\textquoteright}s power consumption estimation can become as low as 649 μW per microphone.",
author = "{Da Silva Gomez}, Bruno and Laurent Segers and An Braeken and Kris Steenhaut and Abdellah Touhafi",
year = "2018",
month = may,
day = "31",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-319-78890-6_23",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-319-78890-6",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
pages = "281--293",
editor = "Nikolaos Voros and Georgios Keramidas and Christos Antonopoulos and Michael Huebner and Diniz, {Pedro C.} and Diana Goehringer",
booktitle = "International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing",
note = "International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC ; Conference date: 02-05-2018 Through 04-05-2018",
url = "http://arc2018.esda-lab.cied.teiwest.gr/",
}