Conventional active noise cancelling (ANC) headphones often perform well in reducing the low-frequency noise and isolating the high-frequency noise by earmuffs passively. The existing ANC systems often use high-speed digital signal processors to cancel out disturbing noise, which results in high power consumption for a commercial ANC headphone. The contribution of this paper can be classified into: 1) proper filter length selection; 2) low-power storage mechanism for convolution operation; and 3) high-throughput pipelining architecture. With these novel techniques, we develop an area-/power-efficient ANC circuit by using the TSMC 90-nm CMOS technology for in-ear headphone applications.