We are pleased to announce a major milestone in our processor development: the KAVUAKA 2.0 prototype has now successfully booted on silicon. Over the coming weeks, our team will perform exhaustive validation of every system component to ensure full functionality and performance.
KAVUAKA 2.0 is the second-generation hearing-aid processor, fabricated on GlobalFoundries’ 22 nm FDSOI platform. Thanks to dynamic reverse body-biasing (RBB), it delivers FinFET-like performance with exceptional energy efficiency. Building on the proven KAVUAKA 1.0 architecture, the new design retains the 2-issue VLIW-SIMD core with flexible 64-bit subword lanes (8×8, 4×16, 2×32, 1×64) and adds dedicated ISA extensions and hardware mechanisms to accelerate neural-network-based audio signal processing. These targeted optimizations, together with FDSOI RBB, yield substantial power savings—an essential advantage for always-on hearing-aid systems. Next, our engineers will conduct comprehensive functional testing, power and performance characterization, and benchmark validation. We will then evaluate the processor under realistic audio workloads, using the results to guide system integration and eventual commercial deployment.
Further information can be found here:
- KAVUAKA 1.0: A low-power, application-specific hearing-aid processor – https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8920354
- Survey of application-specific processor architectures for digital hearing aids – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11265-021-01648-0
We extend our sincere thanks to GlobalFoundries for support in fabricating the KAVUAKA 2.0 silicon prototypes.