Audio Development Kit Brings Wake-Word Support to Raspberry Pi

March 16, 2022

We take a look at Knowles' IA8201 EVM Kit that provides multi-microphone audio support for a Raspberry Pi host.

I recently had the opportunity to dig into Knowles Electronics' AISonic IA8201 Development Kit for Raspberry Pi. It's a multi-board solution that plugs into the Raspberry Pi header (Fig. 1).

1. AISonic Raspberry Pi Development Kit uses an IA8201 DSP processor to handle audio processing and watch word recognition.

The IA8201 DSP is built around a pair of Tensilica-based, audio-centric DSP cores. The DeltaMax core handles high-performance computing, including machine-learning algorithms. It's an Xtensa L5 128-bit, 4-way, floating-point SIMD DSP core with extensions to optimize frame-based audio analysis and deep-neural-network (DNN) models.

The other low-power core is a 64-bit HemiDelta Xtensa LX5 that provides always-on audio processing. It is a 2-way, floating-point SIMD DSP core with Xtensa HiFi 3 and Knowles instruction set enhancements.

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William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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