Synaptics launches Astra SR200 microcontrollers with built-in Coral NPU for edge AI

Edge AI chip company Synaptics has launched the Astra SR200 series of xMCUs. These add multimodal edge AI capabilities on top of regular microcontrollers.

The series uses a heterogeneous AI-native architecture with the Torq AI engine and Google Research's Coral NPU built in. With custom high-bandwidth DRAM that can scale to hundreds of MB, it can run larger AI models on the device, delivering up to 400 GOPS of AI power.

It's also the first in the industry to combine Arm Cortex-M85 and Cortex-M52 cores, targeting AI wearables, connected cameras, and industrial vision and voice systems. Synaptics also built the Coralboard SR dev board around the top-end Astra SR250, with support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and more.