Network-on-Chip in Digital Hearing Aids

This project investigates the costs of replacing the communication structure of a hearing aid system developed by Widex A/S. The existing design is based on an inflexible ad-hoc point-to-point structure, which is sought replaced by a flexible communication structure in future system designs. Two NoC structures have been implemented and synthesized for area and power estimation. As power consumption and area cost are constrained design parameters in hearing aids, all design effort has been put into designing the cheapest solution that fulfill the system requirements. The power dissipation and area estimates of the NoCs are compared to the current system design to get a realistic estimate of the costs involved in using a NoC. The comparison shows a low area and power overhead, which indicate that NoC are suitable for even small lower power DSP-systems. This report documents the design, implementation and synthesis of the networks. Design choices involved in designing NoCs such as topology, application mapping, services, routing and interfacing are discussed. As the NoC solution is designed with a particular system in mind, an introduction to digital hearing aid systems is also given along with a short introduction to the NoC concept.

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