NXP Semiconductors N.V. has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA that will lead to further acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, the partnership will enable NVIDIA’s trained AI models into NXP’s broad portfolio of edge processing devices through the eIQ® machine learning development environment.

For that reason, developers will be able to accelerate development in the increasingly competitive world of AI. This has become possible by the functional integration of the NVIDIA TAO Toolkit into the NXP’s eIQ machine learning development environment. NXP is the first semiconductor vendor to integrate the NVIDIA TAO APIs directly within an AI enablement offering. Hence, making it easier for developers to deploy trained AI models at the edge.

Shapes Smart Connected World

Simplifying the training and deployment of AI models is one of the biggest challenges facing today’s AI developers. To address this challenge, NXP collaborated with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA TAO APIs directly within NXP’s eIQ machine learning development environment. The NVIDIA TAO low-code AI framework makes it easier to leverage trained AI models and fine-tune them for specific uses with transfer learning. At the same time, NXP’s eIQ development environment eases the deployment of these models to the edge through a combination of software, inference engines, neural network compilers and optimized libraries. As a result, customers benefit from accelerated AI development, access to a library of pre-tested AI models, and the ability to deploy them on NXP’s wide portfolio of edge processors.

“AI innovation will define the future of the smart connected world,” said Charles Dachs, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Industrial and IoT Edge, NXP. In addition, Dachs said, “Combining NVIDIA’s expertise in training and testing AI models with NXP’s long history of industrial and IoT edge innovation creates a synergy that allows our customers to bring their AI models to market quickly and easily.”

“NVIDIA TAO greatly simplifies the creation and deployment of AI models, including state-of-the-art generative AI models,” said Deepu Talla, Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “This collaboration brings highly accurate, optimized AI models tuned with NVIDIA TAO and plugged seamlessly into NXP’s eIQ development environment to accelerate edge AI deployments.”

Delivers Single Platform

The NXP eIQ machine learning software development environment enables the use of AI algorithms on NXP’s broad portfolio of microcontrollers and microprocessors. It comes fully integrated into NXP’s MCUXpresso SDK and Yocto Project Linux development environments. Thus, allowing developers to develop complete system-level applications with ease.

The eIQ machine learning development environment will directly integrate NVIDIA TAO APIs. For that reason, it will deliver a single platform for model AI training, optimization and deployment. NVIDIA TAO provides an API-driven workflow that leverages a collection of pre-trained models and transfer learning to enable users to build custom AI models.

Moreover, NVIDIA TAO provides several optimizations, such as model pruning, that increase the inference throughput.

-19 March 2024-