Product of the Week: Opal Kelly’s SYZYGY Hub, UltraScale+ FPGA Platform
August 10, 2026
Sponsored Story
Created by Opal Kelly, the SYZYGY open peripheral standard is an open standard for high-performance peripheral connectivity, bridging the gap between FMC cards and Pmod connectors. The company offers over twenty peripherals, including cameras, high-speed ADCs and DACs, DAQ, Ethernet, breakout and debug boards, allowing you to build your own SYZYGY modules.
Through this open standard, engineers can design their own modules, and readers can change what the Hub does without respinning a board.
Now, built around the standard and designed as a compact FPGA evaluation and development platform, is the SYZYGY Hub (SZG-HUB1450), built for data acquisition, instrumentation, software-defined radio, machine vision, photonics, and edge AI.
SZG-HUB1450 with AMD Artix UltraScale+ AU10P
The SYZYGY Hub in Action
The SYZYGY Hub is built on the AMD Artix UltraScale+ (XCAU10P) FPGA, featuring 96,000 system logic cells, 400 DSP slices, and 3.5 MiB of block RAM. For memory, the hub supports 1 GiB of DDR4 memory, a low-jitter 156.25 MHz LVDS oscillator (2.5 ps RMS), and a 16-bit-wide data interface.
The host interface supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C transferring data at up to 10 Gbps over a single USB-C cable. Additionally, a dedicated USB-C power port supplies up to 45 W for heavier loads.
Expansion options include three SYZYGY Standard ports, HP and HD banks with SmartVIO voltage negotiation (1.2–3.3 V), allowing for over a dozen swappable SYZYGY peripherals, including high-speed ADC and DAC modules, a 3.4 MP camera, multi-channel data acquisition,
Gigabit Ethernet, and sensor and Pmod breakouts.
Getting Started with the SYZYGY Hub
For software, the hub comes equipped with the FrontPanel 6 SDK and app platform. The microcontroller includes pre-built firmware that handles the USB link, and drop-in HDL modules expose endpoints inside the user's design. The API controls the functionality from C++, Python, C#, Java, Ruby on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The FrontPanel Platform’s app launcher features a drag-and-drop configuration of bitfiles and apps, in addition to a Platform API for building host applications in TypeScript and HTML.
The browser-native approach functions alongside AI-assisted development in tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and an MCP server allows for read and control of hardware in plain language.
FrontPanel 6 Development Platform
Additional Resources:
- Product Page: opalkelly.com/syzygyhub
- Introducing the SYZYGY Hub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YOJBnCVOpg
