Implementing Keyword Spotting on the MCUX947 Microcontroller with Integrated NPU

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08911v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:38:21 GMT
• Title: Implementing Keyword Spotting on the MCUX947 Microcontroller with Integrated NPU
• Abstract summary: This paper presents a keyword spotting (KWS) system implemented on the MCXN947 microcontroller with an integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU)<n>The system combines MFCC feature extraction with a CNN, optimized using Quantization Aware Training to reduce model size with minimal accuracy drop.<n> Experimental results demonstrate a 59x speedup in inference time when leveraging the NPU compared to CPU-only execution.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper presents a keyword spotting (KWS) system implemented on the NXP MCXN947 microcontroller with an integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), enabling real-time voice interaction on resource-constrained devices. The system combines MFCC feature extraction with a CNN classifier, optimized using Quantization Aware Training to reduce model size with minimal accuracy drop. Experimental results demonstrate a 59x speedup in inference time when leveraging the NPU compared to CPU-only execution, achieving 97.06% accuracy with a model size of 30.58 KB, demonstrating the feasibility of efficient, low-power voice interfaces on embedded platforms.

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