Digital Hearing Aids: Challenges and Solutions for Ultra Low Power

Demands for Digital hearing aids and other portable digital audio devices are becoming more and more challenging: On the one hand more computational performance is needed for new algorithms including noise reduction, improved speech intelligibility, beam forming, etc. On the other hand flexibility through programmability is needed to allow for product differentiation and longer lifetime of hardware designs. Both requirements have to be met by extremely low power solutions eing operated out of very small batteries. Hence, new hearing aids are examples of ultra low power designs and technologies. The session comprises a tutorial introduction into modern signal processing algorithms of hearing aids and respective quality metrics. Next recent developments in industrial hearing aid architectures are presented. Finally new research results in power optimization of signal processing algorithms and circuit implementations suitable for hearing aids are shown.