Bioinspired recognition of cricket calling songs in sub-nanowatt inter-pulse delay detector

Energy efficiency is one of the main concerns in the design of embedded circuits, especially considering the ever-growing amount of portable devices produced for specialized to everyday life applications. Taking inspiration from neuronal processes in the brain, neuromorphic systems are seen as promising solutions to this concern. Great advances in all fields led to the production of numerous hardware implementations, digital or mixed-signal for the most part. While digital systems showcase high accuracy performances and an advanced technological maturity, they fail to reach the ultra-low power (ULP) consumptions of emerging technologies or fully analog implementations due to generally non-dedicated chips and bulky hardware. In this work, we designed and implemented a bioinspired analog demonstrator of inter-pulse delay detection on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor in the subthreshold operation mode. Relying on the temporal pattern recognition mechanism in female field crickets, our circuit reach on average 750 pW of total power consumption under probes during detection on real-world recordings of male crickets calling song. The circuit was evaluated in quiet, noisy, and multi-source environments, demonstrating strong detection performances given its sparse architecture and ULP consumption.