While many eyes, including mine, were on CES this week, today, I wanted to talk about a tech announcement that may have flown under the radar in the run-up to the holidays. I’ve been following Synaptics for some time now and watched it progress from Synaptics 1.0 (PC trackpads, etc.) to 2.0 (mobile, fingerprint readers) and now, what it calls Synaptics 3.0—a much more focused Synaptics, expanding aggressively into new, rapidly growing markets such as consumer IoT and automotive. Under new CEO Michael Hurston (who took the reins in 2019), Synaptics has been able to break out of the stagnation it fell into in the mid-2010s. While Synaptics has long had an impressive portfolio of IP—1,800+ patents and counting—it struggled to develop effective roadmaps and engage constructively with customers. A big part of the company’s comeback is due to its renewed focus and diversification into IoT, the success of which was evident in Synaptics’ recent Q1 earnings results. And that is the category where today’s news falls: the introduction of a new offering, the Katana Platform, an SoC for low power edge AI. Let’s take a look at what Katana is all about.

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