1. Sub-mW Keyword Spotting on an MCU: Analog Binary Feature Extraction and Binary Neural Networks.
- Author
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Cerutti, Gianmarco, Cavigelli, Lukas, Andri, Renzo, Magno, Michele, Farella, Elisabetta, and Benini, Luca
- Subjects
FEATURE extraction ,ENERGY consumption ,DEEP learning ,ACQUISITION of data ,MICROCONTROLLERS - Abstract
Keyword spotting (KWS) is a crucial function enabling the interaction with the many ubiquitous smart devices in our surroundings, either activating them through wake-word or directly as a human-computer interface. For many applications, KWS is the entry point for our interactions with the device and, thus, an always-on workload. Many smart devices are mobile and their battery lifetime is heavily impacted by continuously running services. KWS and similar always-on services are thus the focus when optimizing the overall power consumption. This work addresses KWS energy-efficiency on low-cost microcontroller units (MCUs). We combine analog binary feature extraction with binary neural networks. By replacing the digital preprocessing with the proposed analog front-end, we show that the energy required for data acquisition and preprocessing can be reduced by $29\times $ , cutting its share from a dominating 85% to a mere 16% of the overall energy consumption for our reference KWS application. Experimental evaluations on the Speech Commands Dataset show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy and energy efficiency, respectively, by 1% and $4.3\times $ on a 10-class dataset while providing a compelling accuracy-energy trade-off including a 2% accuracy drop for a $71\times $ energy reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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