FPGA Prototype Implementation of Digital Hearing Aid from Software to Complete Hardware Design

The design and implementation of digital hearing aids requires a detailed knowledge of various digital signal processing techniques used in hearing aids like Wavelet Trans-forms, uniform and non-uniform Filter Banks and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). In this paper the design and development of digital part of hearing aid is divided into three different phases. In the first phase review and Matlab simulation of various signal processing techniques used in the digital hearing aids is presented. In the second phase a software implementation was carried out and the firmware was designed for the Xilinx Microblaze softcore processor system. In the third phase everything was moved into hardware using VHDL hardware description language. The implementation was done on Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Development Board.

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