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Phased Array Microphone (2023)
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of thousands of points simultaneously in real time.
For some reason (likely the low rigidity of the panel and some suboptimal solder paste stencil patterns combined with the LGA microphone footprints), the yields on the arm PCBs are not very good, with only 50% of them working out of the box. An FPGA is used to collect all the data, due to the large number of low latency IOs available combined with the ability to communicate using high speed interfaces (e.g. Gigabit Ethernet). Some current limitations with the Triton language around support to indexing with shared memory arrays lead to slightly suboptimal performance, but writing CUDA C++ doesn’t seem very fun…
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