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Google and Synaptics unveil open-standard edge AI chips; on-device inference under 6 milliwatts
At Synaptics Tech Day in San Jose, Synaptics launched commercial silicon built on Google's open Coral NPU standard — the second-gen Astra SR200 series and the Coralboard SR dev kit — claiming about 40% lower energy use than prevailing edge AI processors, with a fully open toolchain.
Why it matters
Google is taking its Coral NPU open standard into commercial production. At Synaptics Tech Day in San Jose, California, on October 20, Synaptics unveiled three commercial silicon and hardware products built on Coral NPU technology, supported by the open IREE/MLIR toolchain. The second-generation Astra SR200 series is taped out and launching this month, integrating the second-gen Coral NPU (with RISC-V Vector Core support) to deliver 400 GOPS in an ultra-low-power MCU package, built for battery-powered wearables and industrial sensor nodes. Average on-device inference draws less than 6 milliwatts, about 40% less energy than prevailing edge AI processors, according to the companies.
Full report
The lineup includes the Astra SR200 chips and the Coralboard SR developer kit: the Coralboard SR targets milliwatt-class wearable applications, while the Coralboard SL reaches 1 TOPS. Synaptics CEO Rahul Patel said at Google Research's Research@ event on October 14 that the new chips will also be built into Google devices, though neither company named products or shipping dates.
It caps 18 to 24 months of work between Google Research and Synaptics, whose partnership began in January 2025 (Coral NPU plus the Astra SL2610). Google has released the complete 32-bit RTL on GitHub, is working with VeriSilicon on design verification, and with GlobalFoundries on the 12LP+ FinFET process to speed commercial production, alongside an open-source MPACT simulator and a reference FPGA design so hardware teams can tune model performance before committing to fabrication.
On the roadmap: the next Coral M3 design is complete, adds native 32-bit floating-point support to run the Gemma 3 270M small language model on-device; Synaptics has committed to chips based on future Coral designs, with no shipping date given for M3 silicon. Samples are being demonstrated at Tech Day 2026, with broader availability expected in the first half of 2027. The chips handle voice, vision, motion and contextual sensing simultaneously, targeting smart glasses, wearables and industrial vision sensors.
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