NXP snaps up Kinara to boost AI Edge offering
NXP Semiconductors is buying Kinara, a provider of high performance, energy-efficient and programmable discrete neural processing units (NPUs) for $307 million.
The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2025.
The deal enhances NXP’s presence in Edge AI applications including multi-modal generative AI models.
The prize is a slice of an Edge AI applications market that forecasts will grow at 30 per cent CAGR to $40 billion by 2030.
As existing partners, Kinara and NXP make it easy to pair Kinara’s NPUs with NXP’s industry-leading portfolio of industrial and IoT processors. Together, the companies will create tighter integration of solutions to deliver scalable AI platforms for a variety of industrial and automotive AI inference needs.
“The industrial market is going through a transformation, with new innovations like generative AI helping to deliver major improvements in efficiency, sustainability, safety and predictability, and in many instances, unlock new use cases and functionality,” said Rafael Sotomayor (pictured), executive vice president and general manager, Secure Connected Edge at NXP. “Adding Kinara’s AI capabilities to our broad intelligent edge portfolio creates a scalable platform for new classes of AI-powered systems. Together, we can help our customers simplify complexity and accelerate time to market as they create transformative AI systems.”
Advanced AI at the edge enables critical decisions to be made locally and independently from the cloud, leading to faster responses, improved data privacy, and reduced costs.
Kinara’s innovative NPUs and comprehensive software enablement deliver energy-efficient AI performance across a range of neural networks, including conventional AI, as well as generative AI, to address the rapidly growing AI needs of industrial and automotive markets. The acquisition will enhance and strengthen NXP’s ability to provide complete and scalable AI platforms, from TinyML to generative AI, by bringing discrete NPUs and robust AI software to NXP’s portfolio of processors, connectivity, security, and advanced analogue solutions.
Kinara’s discrete NPUs, including the Ara-1 and Ara-2, are among the industry leaders in performance and power efficiency. This makes them the preferred solution for emerging AI applications in vision, voice, gesture, and a variety of other generative AI-powered multi-modal implementations.
Both devices feature an innovative architecture that enables mapping of the inference graphs for efficient execution on Kinara’s programmable proprietary neural processing units for maximizing edge AI performance. This programmability ensures adaptability as AI algorithms continue to evolve from CNNs to generative AI and new approaches such as agentic AI in the future.
Ara-1 is the first generation discrete NPU, capable of advanced AI inferencing at the edge. Ara-2, capable of up to 40 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), the second generation NPU, is optimized for achieving system-level high performance for generative AI. The Ara-1 and Ara-2 NPUs can be easily integrated with embedded systems to enhance their AI capabilities, including upgrading existing in-field systems.
Kinara also provides a complete software development kit enabling customers to optimize AI model performance and streamline the deployment. Kinara’s AI software portfolio includes extensive model libraries and model optimization tools, which will be integrated into NXP’s eIQ AI/ML software development environment to enable customers to quickly and easily create end-to-end AI systems.
