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

Abstract

The design and implementation of digital hearing aids requires adetailed knowledge of various digital signal processing techniques usedin hearing aids like Wavelet Transforms, uniform and non-uniform FilterBanks and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). In this paper the design anddevelopment of digital part of hearing aid is divided into threedifferent phases. In the first phase review and Matlab simulation ofvarious signal processing techniques used in the digital hearing aids ispresented. In the second phase a software implementation was carried outand the firmware was designed for the Xilinx Microblaze softcoreprocessor system. In the third phase everything was moved into hardwareusing VHDL hardware description language. The implementation was done onXilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Development Board.