Synaptics Announces Astra SR200 Series xMCU with Up to 400GOPS On-Device Multimodal AI Inference
Synaptics launches the Astra SR200 series extended microcontroller (xMCU), integrating custom DRAM and NPU to run large multimodal AI models on-device.
US semiconductor company Synaptics announced the “Astra SR200” series of extended microcontrollers (xMCU) on October 29, 2026. The product line aims to overcome the memory capacity and computational performance constraints of traditional MCUs by integrating high-bandwidth custom DRAM and dedicated AI accelerators to enable on-device multimodal AI processing.
According to EDN Japan, the Astra SR200 series utilizes Synaptics’ “Torq AI” engine and features a Transformer-compatible “Coral NPU” developed by Google Research, delivering up to 400 GOPS (billion operations per second) of AI inference performance. The architecture combines Arm Cortex-M85 and M52 cores with integrated image and audio processing capabilities. Synaptics states that its hierarchical architecture allows combining up to 8 MB of SRAM with scalable, high-bandwidth custom DRAM, enabling workloads to run at one-third the power consumption of typical system DRAM.
The series consists of three pin-compatible product lines: the SR210 offers 200 GOPS for always-on voice processing and sensing; the SR230 adds image processing and display functions with 300 GOPS; and the SR250 targets advanced edge applications with dual image and display paths, providing 400 GOPS. These specifications are vendor-reported and have not yet been independently verified, nor has a specific mass production delivery timeline been disclosed.