Google Research and Synaptics Partner to Showcase Immersive Edge AI Experiences Powered by the Coralboard at Google I/O 2026

Synaptics Incorporated and Google Research will spotlight Edge AI use cases on the recently announced Synaptics Coralboard at Google I/O 2026. The Coralboard is designed to help developers move faster from prototyping to real-world Edge AI product development. Powered by the Synaptics Astra™ SL2610 product line with the Synaptics Torq™ NPU and Coral NPU technology from Google Research, the development board offers an open, feature-rich and standards-based platform for bringing multimodal on-device AI experiences to life.

Designed for always-on, power-efficient Edge AI, this version of the Coralboard combines a compact developer-ready design with a rich set of interfaces supporting rapid prototyping. Powered by the 2GHz Synaptics Astra SL2619 dual-core SoC with 2GB DDR4 DRAM and a 1 TOPS CNN and transformer capable NPU subsystem, the board supports CSI camera input, DSI display connectivity, RGB LEDs, microphones, and a buzzer. Optional add-ons expand platform capability via an M.2 module for Wi-Fi^®/Bluetooth^® connectivity, SD card support, USB peripherals, and mikroBUS-, and Qwiic-compatible sensors.

At Google I/O 2026, Synaptics is partnering with Google on “Jellectronica”, a live AI-powered music experience enabled by the Coralboard. In the pre-show installation, an NPU-accelerated YOLOv8 object detection model running on the Coralboard tracks movement of jellyfish from the Monterey Bay Aquarium via a live stream, turning motion data into control signals for a generative music performance powered by Google DeepMind’s Lyria Realtime model. The experience demonstrates how developers can combine vision and real-time inference at the Edge using an accessible developer platform like Coralboard.

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Google I/O attendees can participate in an on-site experience for the opportunity to take home a Coralboard with an out-of-box developer experience that’s engineered to reduce setup time and speed up prototyping. With built-in support for hardware-accelerated Gemma™ 3 270M, together with the open-source MLIR-based Synaptics Torq™ toolchain, developers can build, optimize, deploy, and iterate on vision, audio, and generative AI workloads using a consistent workflow. The result is a practical platform for AI and ML engineers, system architects and OEMs building next-generation Edge AI products.

“Edge AI is evolving as a frontier for innovation. Coralboard gives developers a powerful new way to turn breakthrough AI into real-world experiences at the Edge,” said Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research.

“We are very excited to put the Synaptics Coralboard directly into developers’ hands at Google I/O,” said Billy Rutledge, Director, Google Research. “Coralboard makes it dramatically easier to bring advanced AI to the Edge. By pairing efficient, AI-native hardware with an open software stack, this platform lowers the barrier to building private, always-on experiences that run all day in power-constrained environments. Our collaboration reflects a shared commitment to accessible, secure Edge AI for developers everywhere.”

“Gemma helps developers bring capable generative AI to smaller, efficient devices. With the Coralboard, developers can quickly test, tune, and deploy Gemma-based experiences for real-world Edge AI use cases,” said Olivier Lacombe, Product Director, Google DeepMind.

“We’re at a tipping point where AI is moving out of the cloud and into everyday devices. The Coralboard is designed to accelerate that shift—giving developers and OEMs a fast path to build and deploy real-time, multimodal AI products for the Edge at scale. Together with Google, we’re helping enable a new class of intelligent, always-on systems where performance, power efficiency, and on-device intelligence define the user experience,” said Vikram Gupta, SVP & GM, Edge Compute & Connectivity Solutions Division, Synaptics.

“We designed this platform to remove friction for developers. It is compact, feature-rich, and easy to extend, so teams can spend less time setting up hardware and more time building differentiated Edge AI applications,” said Robert Otreba, CEO, Grinn Global.

Synaptics and Google Research will showcase the limited edition Synaptics Coralboard at the Gemma pavilion during Google I/O 2026.

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