Synaptics® Incorporated announced that its Astra SL-Series of embedded AI-native Internet of Things (IoT) processors won the prestigious Best in Show Award from Embedded Computing Design in the category of Microcontrollers, Microprocessors & IP. Announced last week at Embedded World, the SL-Series allows designers to bring AI directly to their products independent of the data center, ensuring data privacy and rapid response times. The family of embedded processors provides industry-leading compute capability at power-consumption levels that enable a wide range of consumer, enterprise, and industrial edge IoT applications.

The SL-Series is supported by the Astra Machina? Foundation Series development kit. The kit helps AI beginners and experts quickly unlock the processors?

superior AI capabilities, powerful processing and graphics performance, and matching wireless connectivity, starting with Synaptics? SYN43711 and SYN43752 Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® combo SoCs. Customers are asking for AI in virtually any product.

Synaptics Astra, the AI-native compute platform for the IoT, provides the structure, scalability, and flexibility to meet that demand. It is based on scalable hardware, unified software, an adaptive open-source AI framework, a partner-based ecosystem, and seamless and robust wireless connectivity. Technical highlights: The SL-Series multi-core Linux or Android systems on chip (SoCs) are based on Arm®Cortex®A-series CPUs and features hardware accelerators for edge inferencing and multimedia processing on audio, video, vision, image, voice, and speech.

Each of the three devices in the SL-Series offers unique features and benefits, catering to different multi-modal application requirements and feature ?out-of-the-box? AI: The SL1680 is based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 64-bit CPU, a 7.9 TOPS NPU, a high-efficiency, feature-rich GPU, and a multimedia accelerator pipeline. It is ideal for home and industrial control, smart appliances, home security gateways, digital signage, displays, point-of-sale systems, and scanners.

The SL1640 is optimized for cost and power and is based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor, a 1.6+ TOPS NPU, and a GE9920 GPU. It is ideal for smart home appliances, enterprise conferencing, smart speakers, displays and signage, consumer, and industrial control panels. The SL1620 is also based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU subsystem, a feature-rich GPU for advanced graphics and AI acceleration, superior audio algorithms, and dual displays.

Applications include enterprise multimedia conferencing, smart appliances, home security gateways, digital signage, displays, point-of-sale systems, and smart speakers.