NXP Semiconductors

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Kinara, Inc., an industry leader in high performance, energy-efficient and programmable discrete neural processing units (NPUs). 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 $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 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.

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 analog solutions.

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. 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.

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——Rafael Sotomayor, executive vice president and general manager, Secure Connected Edge, NXP Semiconductors

Advancing Edge AI Innovation with Kinara Discrete NPUs​

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.

Embedded World 2025​

The combined innovations of NXP and Kinara will be on display at Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg. For more information, visit NXP.com/EmbeddedWorld or visit NXP’s Booth #4A-222.

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) today announced the Trimension® SR250, the industry’s first single-chip solution that integrates on-chip processing capabilities with both short-range UWB radar and secure ranging. This is the next leap forward in NXP’s work to enable a world that anticipates and automates, enabling a wide variety of new user experiences based on location, presence or motion detection across consumer or industrial IoT applications.

The Trimension SR250 combines low-power short-range UWB radar operating at 6-8.5 GHz, secure ranging and angle-of-arrival (AoA) calculations to enable new use cases based on UWB mapping, human or object detection and secure positioning. This allows it to deliver convenience, efficiency, safety and privacy features in a smart home, such as turning lights or TVs on or off based on presence, enabling secure home access capabilities, or even monitoring the safety of an elderly person living alone without intrusive cameras. It also supports safety, security and productivity applications in industrial environments, being capable of tracking location for workers, goods or assets, access control, collision avoidance, danger zone detection and more.

The Trimension SR250 represents the next generation of NXP’s advanced UWB solutions, delivering a giant leap towards a world that anticipates and automates. The precise, secure and energy-efficient detection of presence, motion or location enables an almost unlimited number of new user experiences. Our customers across the consumer and industrial IoT will benefit from the reduced power consumption and the streamlined design process enabled by this industry-first solution.

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Philippe Dubois, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Secure Transactions and Identification, NXP

The Trimension SR250 is part of one of the industry’s broadest UWB portfolios, spanning devices across automotive, mobile and IoT applications. It supports 3D AoA, time difference of arrival (TDOA), and takes time of flight (ToF) readings accurate to within ±5 cm. For use cases that require added security, it can be combined with the EdgeLock SE051W secure element. To simplify certification and ensure interoperability, the Trimension SR250 is developed based on the FiRa Consortium 3.0 technical specifications.

Expanding UWB Capabilities with UWB Radar and Integrated Radar Processing​

While UWB secure ranging requires communication between two UWB-enabled devices to detect location or presence, UWB radar is a passive solution requiring only the single-chip IC. Leveraging low-power radar operating at 6-8.5 GHz, the Trimension SR250 can detect presence, location or even motion, such as breathing or gestures. It can also detect and track one or more people or objects when interfaced to a host processor running AI/ML algorithms, such as the i.MX family of applications processors, RW61x family of wireless MCUs or the MCX family of MCUs.

The Trimension SR250 integrates on-chip radar processing, allowing it to perform radar processing autonomously and reducing the overall energy consumption of the system. For example, the host processor can be in a deep sleep mode, while the Trimension SR250 can use the on-chip presence detection to sense a moving person or object. This on-chip processing is crucial to the autonomous home and Industrial IoT capabilities, allowing the system to take actions, such activating or deactivating an HVAC or autonomous robot as a user enters or leaves a defined zone, such as a room in a smart home or a danger zone in a smart factory.

Developer Enablement with Radar Processing​

The Trimension SR250 is supported by firmware, middleware, and sample applications to simplify development and deployment. This includes firmware with support for updates, APIs for the UWB Command Interface, updateable middleware, including C programming language APIs for radar operation, and example radar applications and algorithms.

With a broad ecosystem of partners, modules and development kits, NXP makes it easy to start developing quickly.

Product Availability​

The Trimension SR250 is currently sampling and is expected to be generally available in Q4 2024, including through NXP’s broad ecosystem of module partners. For more information, please see NXP.com/Trimension