We had a great time at Embedded World 2026 in Nuremberg, Germany this year. Steve Johnson sat down with Ken Briota, Editor-in-Chief of Embedded Computing Design, for a walkthrough of what we've been working on — from our latest machine vision demo to the direction we're taking with FrontPanel 6 and SYZYGY.
“We're moving along with our customers towards highly productive programming environments — and it's all much more AI-enabled, which is really important.”
Steve Johnson, President, Opal Kelly
In the interview, Steve walks through three things we were excited to show off this year:
High-speed machine vision over USB 3.2: The centerpiece of our booth was a real-time image acquisition and classification demo, a live video feed pumped through our FPGA board over USB 3.2, with AI-powered object recognition running on the host PC side. It's a strong illustration of the low-latency, high-bandwidth pipeline that our boards are built around, and representative of where our customers are taking this technology.
SYZYGY: IO expansion that actually fits the job: Not every application needs the full weight of FMC, and PMOD doesn't always cut it either. SYZYGY lives in that sweet spot: a compact, cost-effective connector standard built for flexible, granular IO expansion without the complexity overhead. The ecosystem has been growing steadily, with more third-party vendors adopting SYZYGY modules of their own.
FrontPanel 6: same mission, modern tools: The goal hasn't changed: make the interface between a PC and an FPGA as fast and painless to build on as possible. FrontPanel 6 does that in two ways: taking full advantage of AMD's latest FPGA capabilities, and modernizing the software stack with a JavaScript-first, browser-based development environment. It's a deliberate move to meet engineers where they're already working.
As Steve puts it, "we're moving along with our customers towards highly productive programming environments, and it's all much more AI-enabled, which is really important." With the amount of throughput modern applications demand, that AI-readiness isn't an afterthought; it's central to where FPGA development is heading.
Whether you made it to Nuremberg or are just catching up, we hope the conversation gives a useful picture of where Opal Kelly is headed. Have questions about anything Steve covered? Reach out — we'd love to talk.
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