NXP Semiconductors N.V. has moved to acquire Kinara, Inc., a provider of energy-efficient and programmable discrete neural processing units (NPUs). Accordingly, these
devices enable a wide range of edge AI applications, including multi-modal generative AI models.

The acquisition will be an all-cash transaction valued at US$307 million and is expected to close in the first half of 2025.

The acquisition will help NXP fortify its portfolio with cutting edge NPUs and AI software. Thus, driving intelligent system solutions across the industrial and automotive edge markets.

The future of intelligent systems will require secure, cost-effective and energy efficient AI processing at the edge. As a result, the edge AI processing market is growing rapidly. 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.

Addresses Growing AI Needs

Rafael Sotomayor, executive vice president and general manager, Secure Connected Edge, NXP Semiconductors, said Kinara’s innovative NPUs and comprehensive software enablement deliver energy-efficient AI performance across a range of neural networks. This includes conventional AI as well as generative AI. Thus, addressing 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.

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.

In addition, Sotomayor said the industrial market is going through a transformation, with new innovations like generative AI. Therefore, adding Kinara’s AI capabilities to its 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.”

Advancing Edge AI Innovation

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.

Ara-1 is the first generation discrete NPU, capable of advanced AI inferencing at the edge. Ara-2, capable of up to 40 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.