NXP Goes After LLMs at the Edge, Aquires Kinara and Its Ara 40 TOPS Neural Processor Tech
To be produced and sold alongside NXP's existing AI portfolio, Kinara's Ara-1 and Ara-2 tech is now an NXP IP.
NXP Semiconductors has announced the acquisition of edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) specialist Kinara in a deal valued at $307 million — bringing the company's Ara neural processing unit (NPU) technology into the NXP fold.
“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," claims NXP's Rafael Sotomayor, executive vice president and general manager for the secure connected edge. "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."
Kinara is best known for the Ara-1 and Ara-2 neural processing units (NPUs), with the latter delivering a claimed up-to-40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute from eight second-generation accelerator cores. Targeting a 2W power envelope, the chip has been positioned as ideal for running large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI workloads at the edge — and the company had previously partnered with NXP, among others, to ease integration of the chips with existing microprocessors and system-on-chip (SoC) designs.
The acquisition, announced today, sees NXP taking ownership of Kinara and all its assets in a $307 million all-cash deal — expected to close within the first half of the year, subject to the usual regulatory clearance. The company says it plans to continue production of the standalone Ara accelerators, which will exist alongside NXP's in-house machine learning and artificial intelligence IP.
NXP and its newly-acquired subsidiary are scheduled to present at Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg, Germany, on March 11th-13th; interested parties can visit the NXP booth in Hall 4A, Booth Number 4A-222 — and receive a complimentary exhibition pash with voucher code "ew25542821."