Synaptics has unveiled the Coralboard, a compact development board built around its Astra SL2619 edge AI SoC and packing the open-source Google Coral NPU as a 1 TOPS inference engine. The board is making its debut at Google I/O 2026, where it is being distributed as a limited-edition kit to developers attending the conference.

The Astra SL2619 pairs two Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at 2GHz with a single Cortex-M52 real-time core at 200MHz, sitting alongside the Synaptics Torq inference engine that implements the Coral NPU architecture. The silicon lives on a 25 x 25mm Grinn AstraSOM-261x system-on-module with 2GB of DDR4-3200 memory and 16GB of onboard flash, expandable to 64GB. Carrier board I/O includes a 4-lane MIPI DSI display connector, a 2-lane MIPI CSI camera input, microSD storage, a USB-A host port, a USB-C port for 5V power and device-mode data, I2S audio headers, and a 20-pin GPIO header. Expansion comes via mikroBUS, a Qwiic I2C connector, an I3C header, and an M.2 E-key slot that handles SDIO 3.0, UART, and optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules.

On the software side, the Coralboard ships with a Yocto-based Linux build supported by the Synaptics Astra SDK, and can run Google's Gemma 3 270M lightweight model out of the box through the MLIR-based Synaptics Torq toolchain. Synaptics publishes the full SDK source, including a Linux 6.12-based vendor kernel, across the synaptics-astra GitHub organization, giving developers access to the BSP layers, kernel tree, and tooling needed to build and customize images from source (current release: scarthgap_6.12_v2.3.0). Getting-started materials and reference documentation are hosted on the Google Developers Coral site.

For its I/O 2026 showcase, the board powers a demo called Jellectronica, which runs an NPU-accelerated YOLOv8 model to track jellyfish from a live Monterey Bay Aquarium stream and translates their motion into control signals for a generative performance driven by Google DeepMind's Lyria Realtime model. The I/O 2026 edition kit bundles the Coralboard with an Arducam OV5647 1080p mini camera and a mikroBUS Sensor HAT carrying dual microphones, a piezo buzzer, and user LEDs.

The limited-edition kit is exclusive to Google I/O 2026 attendees, and Synaptics says general availability and pricing for the Coralboard will be announced later in 2026. Developers can register interest through the Synaptics interest form or follow updates on the product page.