NXP Semiconductors announced its third acquisition in as many months as it unveiled this week a $307 million deal to acquire Kinara, Inc., a Santa Clara, California, developer of neural processing units (NPUs) technology for edge AI applications.
This acquisition follows last month’s $625 million deal to acquire automotive software company TTTech Auto, and December’s $242.5 million purchase of in-vehicle connectivity enabler Aviva Links.
NXP is absorbing these acquisitions and the new employees they bring at the same time that reports are circulating about the Dutch company possibly planning to lay off as many as 1,800 employees. The latest acquisition announcement also comes just a week after NXP reported fourth quarter earnings that included year-over-year and sequential revenue declines in both its core Automotive and Industrial & IoT business segment, as well as a forecast for as much as a 10% revenue slide for the current quarter.
But edge AI activity has been ramping up in the last two years, and NPUs, which are designed for acceleration of generative AI and machine learning workloads, are seen as increasingly important elements of edge devices and applications.
The Kinara deal, expected to close during the first half of this year, brings NXP products that include Kinara’s first-generation Ara-1 NPU, capable of advanced AI inferencing at the edge, and second-generation Ara-2, which performs at up to 40 TOPS. The company is an existing NXP partner, so integration of these processors with NXP platforms should happen quickly, and the companies already are planning to show off the results at Embedded World 2025 next month in Nuremberg, Germany.
NXP said in a statement that the buying Kinara “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.”
Rafael Sotomayor, executive vice president and general manager, Secure Connected Edge at NXP, added, “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.”