{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "builder_plan": {
    "scenario": "Start with one repeated product task that has a measurable failure or cost.",
    "change": "Read the methods and identify one change you can isolate in that workflow.",
    "baseline": "Your current implementation on the same held-out tasks.",
    "steps": [
      "Locate the paper's implementation and check its license, model support, data needs, and hardware requirements. Stop here if you cannot obtain the required artifacts.",
      "Save a small set of representative product tasks and expected outcomes. Keep evaluation tasks out of any training or tuning, and choose quality and cost limits before running.",
      "Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.",
      "Save per-task outputs, failures, timings, and all usage costs. Review regressions before expanding the test."
    ],
    "measure": "Successful outcomes, response time, human rework, and total cost per successful task.",
    "decision": "Keep the change only if it meets your preselected quality and latency limits and improves the metric you care about after setup and operating costs. Otherwise retain the baseline. This is an exploration plan, not a validated recommendation."
  },
  "builder_review": null,
  "arxiv_id": "2609.37711",
  "title": "Zephyr: An Efficient Audio Denoising System Using Spiking Neural Networks Enabled With A Sparsity-Aware Flexible FPGA PE Array",
  "summary": "Replaces conventional neural network audio denoising inference on edge devices with a spiking neural network (converted Spiking-FullSubNet via QAT and activation simplification) executed on a custom sparsity-aware FPGA processing-element array. Costs include designing and validating custom digital hardware, FPGA-specific engineering, and potential denoising quality degradation from quantization-aware training and simplified activations, none of which the paper's abstract quantifies on the quality side. Adoption fails for anyone without FPGA hardware and hardware-design capacity, and the 28x power claim is a calculated figure for hypothetical 45nm silicon rather than a measured result.",
  "rationale": "The technique requires custom FPGA/digital circuit design for edge audio hardware, which is entirely outside the reader's GPU/API-based production inference practice.",
  "technique": "Spiking neural network audio denoising on custom FPGA",
  "family": "outro",
  "recommendation": "nao_aplica",
  "published": "2026-09-29",
  "as_of": "2026-10-18",
  "editorial_status": "indexed",
  "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37711",
  "independent_implementations": 0,
  "total_implementations": 1,
  "stars": 0,
  "citations": null,
  "claims": [
    {
      "claim_id": "claim-01",
      "statement": "Replaces conventional neural network audio denoising inference on edge devices with a spiking neural network (converted Spiking-FullSubNet via QAT and activation simplification) executed on a custom sparsity-aware FPGA processing-element array. Costs include designing and validating custom digital hardware, FPGA-specific engineering, and potential denoising quality degradation from quantization-aware training and simplified activations, none of which the paper's abstract quantifies on the quality side. Adoption fails for anyone without FPGA hardware and hardware-design capacity, and the 28x power claim is a calculated figure for hypothetical 45nm silicon rather than a measured result.",
      "basis": "inferred",
      "result": "",
      "baseline": "",
      "conditions": "",
      "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37711",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "claim_id": "claim-02",
      "statement": "Approximately 28x improvement in power consumption, reaching 52.9 nJ per 32 ms audio frame in custom digital hardware at 45nm; real-time factor 0.727 at 100 MHz on a PYNQ-Z1 FPGA.",
      "basis": "inferred",
      "result": "",
      "baseline": "",
      "conditions": "",
      "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37711",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    }
  ],
  "exposure_map": [
    {
      "dimension": "quality",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "compute",
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      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "latency",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
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      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "operations",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "compatibility",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "security",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "data_and_training",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "reproducibility",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    }
  ],
  "risks": [],
  "minimum_test": [],
  "open_questions": [],
  "independent_tests": [],
  "lab_reproductions": [],
  "report_available": false,
  "validation_tier": "unknown",
  "evidence_tier": "unknown",
  "infrastructure_basis": "unknown",
  "equations": [],
  "equations_status": "not_fetched",
  "core_kind": "",
  "equations_fetched_at": "",
  "equations_source_url": "",
  "equations_source_sha256": "",
  "exposures_reviewed_at": "",
  "exposures_source_sha256": ""
}