NXP Semiconductors announced it entered a definitive agreement to buy Kinara, an industry leader in high-performance, energy-efficient, and programmable discrete neural processing units (NPUs). And these devices enable a wide range of edge AI applications, including multi-modal generative AI models. This acquisition will be an all-cash transaction valued at $307 million and is expected to close in the first half of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory clearances.
The future of intelligent systems requires secure, cost-effective, and energy efficient AI processing at the edge. So 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.
Kinara’s NPUs and comprehensive software enablement deliver energy-efficient AI performance across a wide range of neural networks, including conventional AI and generative AI, to address the rapidly growing AI needs of industrial and automotive markets. This 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 analog solutions.
As existing partners, Kinara and NXP make it easier to pair Kinara’s NPUs with NXP’s industry-leading portfolio of industrial and IoT processors. Together, these companies will create tighter integration of solutions to deliver scalable AI platforms for a variety of industrial and automotive AI inference needs.
Kinara’s discrete NPUs, such as the Ara-1 and Ara-2, are among the industry leaders in performance and power efficiency. And 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.
These devices feature an innovative architecture that enables the mapping of the inference graphs for efficient execution on Kinara’s programmable proprietary neural processing units to maximize edge AI performance. This programmability ensures adaptability as AI algorithms evolve from CNNs to generative AI and new approaches, such as agentic AI, in the future.
Ara-1 is the first generation discrete NPU that is 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. And 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 offers a complete software development kit enabling customers to optimize AI model performance and streamline the deployment. And 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.
“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. 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.”
– Rafael Sotomayor, executive vice president and general manager, Secure Connected Edge at NXP
