On October 20, we welcomed hundreds of customers, partners, and members of the media to Synaptics Tech Day 2026.
Almost every engineer I talked to wants the same thing: products that see, hear, and understand the world around them, on the device itself. At Tech Day, that ambition was on full display across the room.
Our partner Grinn showcased a robotic gripper that brings Synaptics tactile sensing, compute, and connectivity together in one system. Its camera recognized each object’s color, while tactile sensors driven by our touch controller felt the object’s shape and size. The Synaptics Coralboard™ SL then provided the compute (using Synaptics Astra SL261x SoC with multi CPUs and NPUs architecture) to decide how to pick it up, managing slip and adjusting grip strength in real time, with Synaptics Wi-Fi 7 keeping it all connected.
Elsewhere, Jorjin’s AR glasses, built on the Synaptics Astra® SR200, recognized artwork and overlaid information about it, and translated a menu into another language on the spot, all within the tight power budget required by eyewear. A hand-cranked Coralboard SL ran an interactive vocal conversation with generative AI, entirely on the device. And a UAV running on an Astra processor used our tri-band Wi-Fi for long-range first-person-view flight control.
Across more than 30 demos from Synaptics teams and partners, the message was clear. Edge and Physical AI is a reality. They are running on working silicon today.
Some of the day’s sharpest insights came from our guests. In his keynote, “Sense. Reason. Act.”, Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, founder and CEO of PSYONIC, reminded us why his work matters. An early experience meeting a child living with the loss of a limb inspired his mission to make advanced prosthetics accessible. Today, PSYONIC’s touch-sensing bionic technology is improving the quality of life for people who use it, and it is now helping robots adapt to the world around them.
Our panel, moderated by EE Times Executive Editor Nitin Dahad, brought together Aashish Mehta (TacnIQ.ai), George Chowdhury (ABI Research), Vincent Duchaine (Robotiq), Andrew Herson (NVIDIA), and our own Satish Ganesan to explore where AI meets the physical world, with robotics at its center.
Robotics is the ultimate test of Edge and Physical AI: machines that must sense, reason, and act in real time, often alongside people. Their perspectives captured what drives our innovation: intelligence that improves how people live, and how machines work alongside them.
A growing number of Edge and Physical AI applications demand the performance of an MPU with the efficiency of an MCU. That’s why we launched the Astra SR200 Series, defining a new class of microcontrollers: the xMCU™. Together with our MCUs and MPUs, it gives engineers a full range of compute to match every device.
Great silicon needs a fast path for application developers: from prototype to production. The Synaptics Coralboard SL, developed in collaboration with Google Research, is now generally available from DigiKey, and we also announced the new Coralboard SR, built on the Astra SR200 Series, with availability to follow. Both use the open-source Torq™ compiler and runtime, giving developers one consistent way to deploy AI models across the MPU-based Coralboard SL and the SR200, without proprietary lock-in. That’s what we mean by true Edge AI developer freedom.
The era of Edge and Physical AI has arrived, and Synaptics is ready for it. What excites me most is the problem-solving ahead: what our customers will build next, from robots that adjust their grip in real time to drones that help rescue teams reach people faster.
Thank you to our customers, partners, and the global #OneSynaptics teams who made Tech Day 2026 possible.
To every engineer building that future: start prototyping today with Synaptics Coralboard.