NXP Semiconductors NV

06/10/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/10/2025 16:16

Accelerating Edge AI Innovation with the NXP i.MX 95 Family

In part one of this blog series, I wrote about how NXP's i.MX 95 family brings the latest functional safety features to edge applications, from industrial environments to vehicles. In this next part of the series, I'll explain how the i.MX 95 family delivers advanced AI capabilities to the edge.

Over the past few years, AI innovation has grown exponentially. While a lot of the hype is centered around cloud-based generative AI applications like ChatGPT, the reality is that these applications are extremely costly to run and use massive amounts of energy. Edge processing offers a compelling solution to manage information quickly, efficiently and securely by keeping data and private information on-device. NXP has a long history of delivering edge solutions, and our latest i.MX 95 family takes it to a new level.

Our i.MX 95 applications processors deliver performance, security and more to the edge. Learn why the i.MX 95 family is right for your next AI design.

The i.MX 95 family delivers serious processing power for both conventional ML and generative AI applications at the edge. The i.MX 95 family combines NXP's eIQ® Neutron NPU for machine learning acceleration with immersive 3D graphics powered by an Arm® Mali GPU and an NXP-developed image signal processor. This powerful configuration is scalable for everything from video conferencing systems to large machines in factories.

The i.MX 95 family block diagram includes the SoC's features and top-of-stack specifications. For a better experience, download the block diagram.

The i.MX Advantage for AI Applications

Here are a few AI/ML applications for which the i.MX 95 MPU is well-suited:

  • Visual Inspection and Anomaly Detection: AI-enabled machines in factories can inspect items much faster and more accurately than humans
  • Voice Commands: Smart devices can understand a broad range of words, decipher audio from multiple speakers talking simultaneously and accurately process speech from people with a variety of accents
  • Face and Speaker Tracking: Enterprise video conferencing applications can track who is speaking and keep them in focus to keep conversations engaging
  • Background Noise Removal: Smart devices can remove background noise and perform echo cancellation to better understand users' commands and improve the user experience
  • Occupant Monitoring: Smart home and smart office security applications can track people, objects and animals. Occupant monitoring in vehicles can audit a driver's behavior to see if they are distracted, for example
  • Patient Monitoring: Medical devices can monitor patients' vital signs and alert caregivers when necessary
  • Home and Building Automation: Connected and seamless control of air conditioning, appliances, home security and more are made possible with edge AI

What really differentiates use cases built with the i.MX 95 family is not only the performance of the processors but also their energy efficiency. The eIQ® Neutron NPU is a capable and efficient AI inference engine, providing competitive TOPS-per-watt at the edge. Our energy flex multi-domain architecture has separate processing domains for safety, low-power and real-time applications. This offers fine-grained control of dynamic power and low-power operating modes so the processors can still operate when a large portion of the SoC is powered off.

The i.MX 95 family supports a variety of edge AI applications, including visual inspection and anomaly detection.

AI-Enabled Machine Vision at the Edge

The neural processing unit (NPU), image signal processor (ISP) and video processing unit (VPU) in the i.MX 95 SOC all work together to offer impressive machine vision capabilities at the edge. From home control panels and video surveillance of entryways to factory automation, our eIQ Neutron NPU supports the latest video processing features. Users can run advanced AI models including scene segmentation, live video upscaling and denoising to provide high-quality video footage on the NPU.

The i.MX 95 family can also process multiple streams of video footage at the same time, without having to send information to the cloud. The built-in ISP supports up to eight raw camera sensors via 2x MIPI-CSI 4-lane interface with MIPI virtual channels. To provide better image quality in low-light conditions and enhance facial recognition, the ISP supports RGB-IR cameras, which capture both visible and infrared light simultaneously.

Streamlined Development

To help our customers simplify the development process, our eIQ® AI software development environment supports popular platforms such as:

  • TensorFlow and LiteRT (fka TensorFlow Lite)
  • Pytorch / Executorch
  • ONNX and ONNX RT

The platform also supports different types of neural network structures including CNN, MLP, RNN, LSTM, TCN and LLM/SLM.

To further simplify neural network deployment, our eIQ AI/ML development software offers NVIDIA TAO Toolkit API integration so developers have access to a vast library of pre-trained and fine-tuned AI models to deploy on our i.MX 95 processors.

Our eIQ AI software environment provides developers with the tools needed to innovate AI at the edge.

NXP is also making it easier for developers to customize generative AI models and optimize them for edge applications. We are adding the GenAI Flow to the eIQ development software, which lets customers securely train models on domain-specific knowledge and private data. With this capability, customers can train an LLM on a user manual, for example, so a chatbot can answer users' questions about specific products.

From the extensive AI capabilities of the i.MX 95 processors to our comprehensive developer tools, the i.MX 95 series unleashes powerful machine vision capabilities at the edge in the smart home, the smart office, vehicles, industrial environments, hospitals and beyond.

If you're interested in using the i.MX 95 series for your next project and want to learn more, read more details on the i.MX 95 product page.

Also, stay tuned for part three of this blog series where I'll highlight how the i.MX 95 family offers best-in-class connectivity and security features.

Tags: AI/ML, Technologies

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NXP Semiconductors NV published this content on June 10, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 10, 2025 at 22:16 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at support@pubt.io