Always On and Data Fusion

Our interaction with devices in the home, at the workplace and in public is changing. In the past we used device interfaces like a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. Now the trend is changing, with devices being developed to interact with humans via a human interface including voice, motion and vision. These human-machine interfaces are computationally intensive and use large, power-hungry processors, which greatly reduces battery life. To mitigate the power consumption of these larger processors, smaller, ‘wake-up’ cores are used to detect multiple sensor interface inputs and identify if a human interaction is about to begin, at which time it wakes up the bigger computation core.