AI-enhanced premium audio

Synaptics Incorporated unveils the Astra SR80 and SRW1500 series of MCUs. The Astra SR80 series powers high-performance, immersive audio applications, while the Astra SRW1500 series enables richer, more personalised intelligence generated and securely managed on-device across IoT networks.

The Astra SR80 series of Edge AI Audio MCUs are purpose-built to deliver premium sound and voice experiences across consumer and enterprise IoT platforms and environments with high performance, power efficiency and privacy. Engineered to support always-on intelligence, the Astra SR80 series supports multimodal sensor fusion, continuous context awareness, and intelligent processing across power states. A highly integrated architecture incorporates a programmable Arm Cortex-M33 core, an audio CODEC, high-speed USB and SDIO, in addition to a comprehensive set of audio interfaces. Dedicated NPU and DSP acceleration enable natural and responsive voice-first human-machine interaction and bring differentiated levels of personalization and on-device security to compact form factors.

The SR80 series accelerates time-to-market, with turnkey support for advanced algorithms such as AI-based Noise Reduction and developer-friendly audio tuning software kits. This powerful combination makes the Astra SR80 series ideal as front ends for Agentic AI headsets, enterprise conferencing systems, soundbars, earbuds, augmented reality devices, and other audio-centric applications. Together with the AI-native Astra™ SR100 series, which brings vision processing to the Edge, Synaptics offers a rich portfolio of solutions for high- quality, low-power, streaming vision and audio at the Edge.

The SRW1500 extends the Synaptics Astra MCU portfolio by pairing AI-native compute with next-generation wireless connectivity. The Astra SRW1500 series is among the industry’s first single-chip AI MCU platforms with integrated Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, powered by open, developer-friendly software to enable continuous AI, starting at the far Edge of the IoT network.

The SRW1500 features the Arm Cortex-M52 with Helium DSP, which is a highly area- and energy-efficient implementation of the Armv8.1-M architecture, running at 200 MHz, alongside a 200MHz, 50 GOPS Arm U55 NPU for efficient on-device inferencing. With 1 MB of on-chip SRAM, the SRW1500 SoCs are designed to support pre-processing and accelerating sensor-fusion and signal processing workloads such as noise cancellation, beamforming, feature extraction and Wi-Fi sensing. With PSA Level 3 certified Root-of-Trust security and advanced power management features, the Astra SRW1500 AI MCUs deliver a robust processing platform for embedded applications that bring together multimodal sensing and intelligent connectivity.

The Synaptics Astra SR80 series and Astra SRW1500 are expected to begin sampling in the second calendar quarter of 2026, with production targeted at the last calendar quarter of 2026. Development kits are expected to be available for sampling in early 2026.