Interfacing PDM MEMS Microphones with PFM Spiking Systems: Application for Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Neuromorphic computation processes sensors output in the spiking domain, which presents constraints in many cases when converting information to spikes, loosing, as example, temporal accuracy. This paper presents a spike-based system to adapt audio information from low-power pulse-density modulation...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Gutiérrez Galán, Daniel, Ríos Navarro, José Antonio, Domínguez Morales, Juan Pedro, Durán López, Lourdes, Jiménez Moreno, Gabriel, Jiménez Fernández, Ángel Francisco
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/139364
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/139364
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11063-022-10936-0
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Neuromorphic engineering
FPGA
Address-event
Pulse frequency modulation
Pulse density modulation
Neuromorphic Auditory Sensor
Descripción
Sumario:Neuromorphic computation processes sensors output in the spiking domain, which presents constraints in many cases when converting information to spikes, loosing, as example, temporal accuracy. This paper presents a spike-based system to adapt audio information from low-power pulse-density modulation (PDM) microelectromechanical systems microphones into rate coded spike frequencies. These spikes could be directly used by the neuromorphic auditory sensor (NAS) for frequency decomposition in different bands, avoiding the analog or digital conversion to spike streams. This improves the time response of the NAS, allowing its use in more time restrictive applications. This adaptation was conducted in VHDL as an interface for PDM microphones, converting their pulses into temporal distributed spikes following a pulse-frequency modulation scheme with an accurate inter-spike-interval, known as PDM to spikes interface (PSI). We introduce a new architecture of spike-based band-pass filter to reject DC components and distribute spikes in time. This was tested in two scenarios, first as a stand-alone circuit for its characterization, and then integrated with a NAS for verification. The PSI achieves a total harmonic distortion of −46.18 dB and a signal-to-noise ratio of 63.47 dB, demands less than 1% of the resources of a Spartan-6 FPGA and its power consumption is around 7 mW.