Product Description#

The XCORE-VOICE Solution consists of example designs and a C-based SDK for the development of audio front-end applications to support far-field voice use cases on the xcore.ai family of chips (XU316). The XCORE-VOICE design is currently based on FreeRTOS, leveraging the flexibility of the xcore.ai platform and providing designers with a familiar environment to customize and develop products.

XCORE-VOICE example designs provide turn-key solutions to enable easier product development for smart home applications such as light switches, thermostats, and home appliances. xcore.ai’s unique architecture providing powerful signal processing and accelerated AI capabilities combined with the XCORE-VOICE framework allows designers to incorporate keyword, event detection, or advanced local dictionary support to create a complete voice interface solution.

Key Features#

The XCORE-VOICE Solution takes advantage of the flexible software-defined xcore-ai architecture to support numerous far-field voice use cases through the available example designs and the ability to construct user-defined audio pipeline from the SW components and libraries in the C-based SDK.

These include:

Voice Processing components

  • Two PDM microphone interfaces

  • Digital signal processing pipeline

  • Full duplex, stereo, Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC)

  • Reference audio via I2S with automatic bulk delay insertion

  • Point noise suppression via interference canceller

  • Switchable stationary noise suppressor

  • Programmable Automatic Gain Control (AGC)

  • Flexible audio output routing and filtering

  • Support for Wanson or other 3rd party Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software

Device Interface components

  • Full speed USB2.0 compliant device supporting USB Audio Class (UAC) 2.0

  • Flexible Peripheral Interfaces

  • Programmable digital general-purpose inputs and outputs

Example Designs utilizing above components

  • Far-Field Voice Local Command

  • Far-Field Voice Assistance

Firmware Management

  • Boot from QSPI Flash

  • Default firmware image for power-on operation

  • Option to boot from a local host processor via SPI

  • Device Firmware Update (DFU) via USB or other transport

Power Consumption

  • Typical power consumption 300-350mW

  • Low power modes down to 55mW

Obtaining the Hardware#

The XK-VOICE-L71 DevKit and Hardware Manual can be obtained from the XK-VOICE-L71 product information page.

The XK-VOICE-L71 is based on the: XU316-1024-QF60A

Learn more about the The XMOS XS3 Architecture

Obtaining the Software#

Development Tools#

It is recommended that you download and install the latest release of the XTC Tools. XTC Tools 15.1.4 or newer are required. If you already have the XTC Toolchain installed, you can check the version with the following command:

xcc --version

Application Demonstrations#

If you only want to run the example designs, pre-built firmware and other software can be downloaded from the XCORE-VOICE product information page.

Source Code#

If you wish to modify the example designs, a zip archive of all source code can be downloaded from the XCORE-VOICE product information page.

See the Programming Guide for information on:

  • Prerequisites

  • Instructions for building, running, and debugging the example designs

  • Details on the software design and source code

Cloning the Repository#

Alternatively, the source code can be obtained by cloning the public GitHub repository.

Note

Cloning requires a GitHub account configured with SSH key authentication.

Run the following git command to clone the repository and all submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:xmos/sln_voice.git