Nordic Semiconductor Announces nRF71 Series Wi-Fi 6 And Bluetooth LE SoCs

Nordic Semiconductor's nRF71 Series combines Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE, and Thread in a family of ultra-low-power SoCs that include the dual-band nRF7120 and tri-band nRF7120E. Standby power is up to 20 times lower than current nRF70 Series Wi-Fi products, targeting battery-powered smart home devices, wearables, and industrial IoT hardware.

The nRF7120 supports Wi-Fi 6 at 2.4 and 5 GHz, while the nRF7120E adds the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi 6E alongside an Axon NPU that runs machine learning models 10x to 17x faster than the 256 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 alone. Both parts provide backward compatibility with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Station and SoftAP roles, Target Wake Time, a low-power receiver, and +22 dBm Wi-Fi transmit power. Average connected current at DTIM 10 is 14 µA on 2.4 GHz and 8 µA on 5 GHz.

The multiprotocol radio supports Bluetooth LE up to +10 dBm transmit power, -99 dBm receive sensitivity, Thread, and an NFC tag. Compute relies on a 256 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 paired with a 256 MHz RISC-V coprocessor running SoftPeripherals like CAN 2.0B and SDIO.

Storage and I/O consist of 1 MB low-leakage RAM, 4 MB on-chip non-volatile memory, high-speed USB with integrated PHY, up to 65 GPIOs, dual high-speed MSPI and SPI at up to 64 MHz, a 4 Mbps UART, six SPI/TWI/UART blocks at up to 8 MHz, ADC, TDM, PDM, PWM, and QDEC. Security features TrustZone isolation, tamper detection, the CRACEN cryptographic accelerator, and targets PSA Certified Level 3.

Operating specs include a 2.8 to 5.5 V supply range, −40 to +85°C temperature range, and a 4.9 × 4.6 mm WLCSP package supported in the nRF Connect SDK. Chips are currently sampling to selected customers. Additionally, Nordic is developing a 14 × 10 mm nRF7120 module, u-blox has a module under development named ALMA-W1 using these SoCs, and the nRF7120-DK development kit is listed on DigiKey at $72.38 with a 35-unit minimum order and stock estimated for April 2027.