A Low Complexity Speech Coder for Binaural Communication in Hearing Aids

Abstract

This paper presents a low complexity speech coder with the adaptive Minimum-Maximum Scalar Quantization(MMSQ) method suitable for binaural communication in hearing aids. Compared to the fixed rate MMSQ, the adaptive MMSQ can achieve similar or better compression ratio with 13dB SNR improvement. The final codec implementation with 0.18um CMOS process only costs 6K gate count with 118uW power consumption.