Affiliations: Home Networking Technology Center, Industrial
Technology Research Institute, No.31, Gongye 2nd Rd., Annan District,Tainan
City 709, Taiwan | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI
53706-1691, USA | Multimedia and Communication IC Design Lab, Department
of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, No.1, Dasyue Rd.,
East District, Tainan City 701, Taiwan
Abstract: Previous research has shown that there are two architectures for
speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system implementation. One is client-server
based systems that are built on the server computer, which means they are not
available anytime or anywhere. The other is portable stand-alone devices, which
lack real-time performance. Therefore, this work presents a hardware-software
co-design of a speech translation embedded system for portable S2ST
applications. This system is characterized by small size, low cost, real-time
operation, and high portability. In order to realize the proposed S2ST system,
we have designed the ARM-based system-on-a-programmable-chip (SoPC)
architecture, the speech translation intellectual property, and the software
procedures of the proposed SoPC. The entire design was implemented on ALTERA
EPXA10. The English-to-Mandarin translation process can be completed within 0.5
second at a 40 MHz clock frequency with 1,200 translation patterns. The maximum
frequency is 46.22 MHz, and the usage of logic elements is 19,318 (50% of
the total number of logic elements of the EPXA10 device).
