Synaptics’ Astra platform is a new development environment that encompasses Synaptics’ hardware solutions for AI and multimedia processing at the edge, and connectivity, and unifies these products using base hardware platforms and software suites for streamlined, modular product development.
Key application areas that can benefit when using Astra include smart building, medical monitoring, process control, multi-camera AI video processing, enterprise conferencing, multimedia processing/streaming, security, wearables, home automation, and digital signage.
Synaptic’s Astra Machina base I/O board enables users to easily swap out their choice of SL-series processor module – which can natively run Linux or Android operating systems and are built around top-tier Arm Cortex application processors with up to 8 TOPS inferencing (via NPU) – and wireless connectivity module for adding Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, BLE, 802.15.4, and/or GNSS functionality.
An example of the compute capabilities of Synaptics’ technology can be found in this datasheet for the SL1680 processor SoC, which is built around a quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 64-bit CPU.
A separate Astra base I/O board is due for release to support Synaptics’ SR-series AI-native MCUs for real-time control applications, but as previously noted, software development is unified across these hardware options.
Synaptics’ Astra ecosystem also enables engineers to easily get started developing AI applications thanks to a wealth of experience and pre-developed open-source algorithms for workloads including object, face, pose, and wake-word detection/classification in addition to noise reduction, voice biometrics, and echo cancellation.
More information about the hardware configuration options and the I/O base board connections can be found in this official product brief.
Synaptics’ Astra Machina Kit will be fully available from Q3 2024, so fill out the form below to reserve your place for evaluating this technology for use in your next commercial project.
