Synaptics has extended its award-winning Synaptics Astra AI-Native platform with the SR-Series high-performance adaptive microcontroller units for scalable context-aware Edge AI. The series features three tiers of operation: performance (100 GOPS), efficiency, and ultra-low-power (ULP) always-on (AON) to deliver intelligence at every power level. Based on an Arm Cortex-M55 core and the Arm Ethos-U55 neural processing unit , the SR-Series is supported by the Astra Machina Micro development kit and open-source SDK. It is optimized for multimodal consumer, enterprise, and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) workloads with accelerators and adaptive vision, audio, and voice algorithms. The small-form-factor MCUs have a rich set of peripherals—including multiple camera interfaces—to help minimize system cost, power, and footprint while enabling integration into a wide range of devices, such as battery-operated security cameras, sensors, appliances, point-of-sale, digital signage, and scanners.
“We believe we are at an inflection point in Edge AI where embedded developers have a unique opportunity to redefine human-machine interaction through multimodal processing and contextual awareness,” said Vikram Gupta, Senior Vice President and General Manager of IoT Processors, Chief Product Officer at Synaptics.
The SR-Series comprises three MCUs, the SR110, SR105, and SR102, each with its respective features and benefits that cater to a range of multimodal application requirements. All three MCUs use a Cortex-M55 core with Arm Helium technology running up to 400 MHz. The SR110 also has a Cortex-M4 core and Arm Ethos-U55 NPU and is sampling now; the SR105 has an Ethos-U55 NPU; and the SR102 is a single Cortex-M55 device. Other SR-Series features include:
- Up to 4 MB of system memory, including ULP AON memory
- Streaming vision and audio processing
- MIPI-CSI camera input and passthrough
- Low-power image signal processing
- Secure OTP, TRNG, AES-256, RSA-4096, SHA-512
