Aspinity was founded in 2012 to develop analog signal processing (ASP) IP. Aspinity performs many traditional digital-processing tasks in the analog domain. As a result, data analysis and data reduction can occur at the sensor edge in the natural domain of the sensor data, analog. This significantly reduces power consumption by limiting digitization of sensor data to only data of relevance.

By extracting application-relevant characteristics prior to digitizing the sensor data, Aspinity moves data analytics to the front of the signal chain. Aspinity’s programmable capabilities enable rapid development of analog algorithms for various applications. These algorithms can then be pushed to custom silicon with enough programmable overhead to allow in-product updates.

Examples include activation of a digital speech recognizer using a high-accuracy analog voice detector, or analog analysis of vibrational modes for industrial equipment monitoring. Aspinity’s technology has been proven for applications such as heart rate monitoring via ECG sensing and PPG sensing, in both cases achieving ultra-low power consumption. For capacitive sensing applications, Aspinity’s technology enables analog-domain filtering so that each capacitance-to-digital value is clean, which reduces the touch interface power consumption by an estimated 10X.

Aspinity’s voice-detection solution minimizes power by only powering the microphone and the Aspinity ASP. Dropping Aspinity’s ASP into a voice control signal chain affords an approximately 10x reduction in voice detection power, which extends to a similar reduction in average power to detect an activating keyword.

Aspinity’s Reconfigurable Analog/Mixed-Signal Processor (RAMP) is applicable to a wide range of sensors and signal processing tasks. For custom applications, Aspinity can also supply ICs or IP blocks.

Brandon Rumberg, Ph.D., Cofounder & President (previously a Graduate Research Assistant at West Virginia University)

Vinod Kulathumani, Ph.D., Co-founder & Technical Advisor (Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University)