Alif Semiconductor

Vienna – October 14, 2026 -- Viewpointsystem has launched an eye-tracking module that delivers up to 15 times longer battery runtime than conventional processing on a connected device, according to the company's performance measurements. The Digital Iris Module runs the complete image-based eye-tracking pipeline at 140 Hz on an ultra-low-power Ensemble microcontroller (MCU) from Alif Semiconductor, inside the glasses frame.

Power consumption, heat generation and limited space have so far made eye tracking hard to add to lightweight smart glasses, the company said. Conventional systems send images from eye-facing cameras to a main application processor in the glasses or a connected device. Processing those streams draws power, generates heat and adds system complexity.

Pleasanton, Calif. – September 12, 2026 -- Alif Semiconductor launched a new family of low-cost evaluation boards priced at an MSRP of $49, aimed at lowering the barrier to on-device AI/ML inference for developers.

StartKit boards target two MCU families for edge AI development

The SK-E1C board supports Alif's Ensemble microcontrollers, while the SK-B1 targets the BLE wireless Balletto family. Both boards ship with a superset configuration combining a 160MHz Arm Cortex-M55 CPU core with Helium vector processing extension, an Ethos-U55 NPU, and 2MB of tightly coupled SRAM and MRAM.

NPU delivers inference speeds up to two orders of magnitude faster than traditional MCUs

Alif states the Ethos-U55 NPU included in both boards accelerates inference performance by up to 100x compared to running identical workloads on a conventional MCU core, positioning the StartKit line for battery-powered, always-on AI applications.