Design and Implementation of Reconfigurable Digital

Filter Bank for Hearing Aid

ABSTRACT
A hearing aid is an electroacoustic device for improvingthe hearing ability of hearing
impaired. In a simple hearing aidgain is applied to the whole input frequency range, due to
whichthe intensities of some speech sounds after amplification will belarger than the
discomfort thresholds.To solve this problem ahighly reconfigurable non-uniform digital FIR
filter bankstructure is proposed, where the whole frequency range isdivided into several
subbands and each subband has its ownamplification coefficient. The non-uniform spaced
subbands canbe realized with Variable Bandwidth Filters (VBF). Each VBFcan be realized as
a combination of arbitrary sample rateconverters and FIR filter. The Distributed Arithmetic
(DA) based FIR filter is a wise choice where all the multiplications and additions are replaced
by a lookup table and shifter-accumulator. The proposed architecture uses a multiplier less
structure, wherethe sample rate converters are realized using Cascaded Integrator Comb
(CIC) filters and the FIR filter uses Distributed Arithmetic. The use of multiplier less
structures leads tosignificant decrease in area and power consumption. Modern devices also
utilize sophisticated digital signal processing to try and improve speech intelligibility and
comfort for the user. Such signal processingincludes feedback management, wide dynamic
range compression, directionality, frequency lowering, and noise reduction.
Keywords: Variable Bandwidth Filters, cascaded integrator comb(CIC) filters, Distributed
Arithmetic (DA).

Guided by
K.Ayyappa