(PR) Synaptics Announces Astra SR200 text-and-image Edge AI Processors with Google Coral NPU

What happened

Synaptics Incorporated (Nasdaq: SYNA) today introduced the xMCU, a new class of microcontrollers that runs multimodal (able to work with more than one kind of input, such as text and images) Edge AI, with the launch of the Synaptics Astra SR200 Series. Unlike conventional MCUs constrained by limited on-chip memory and compute, the xMCU combines heterogeneous, AI-native compute and acceleration with integrated high-bandwidth custom DRAM scalable to hundreds of megabytes, enabling larger AI models and richer multimodal workloads to run entirely on-device. Google is an Internet and software company based in Mountain View, and its products and services include Google Voice.

The Astra SR200 Series of xMCUs is designed for the next generation of AI wearables, battery-powered sensing devices, connected cameras, streamers, and industrial vision and voice systems. The SR200 Series is powered by the Synaptics Torq AI engine, which brings a standards-based hardware architecture and unified developer experience featuring the Coral NPU (a chip built specifically to run AI models) from Google Research. It also comes with the industry's first pairing of the Arm Cortex -M85 and Cortex -M52.