Nordic launches nRF71 Wi-Fi chips with edge AI and lower standby power
Nordic Semiconductor has announced the nRF71 Series, a new line of ultra-low-power system-on-chip products that bring together Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread and edge AI onto a single chip.
·1 min read·AB
Nordic Semiconductor has announced the nRF71 Series, a new line of ultra-low-power system-on-chip products that bring together Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread and edge AI onto a single chip. The company says the series delivers up to 20 times lower standby power usage than its current generation nRF70 Series Wi-Fi products, which it expects will open up new possibilities for battery-powered devices in smart home, wearable and industrial IoT applications.
The chips include an integrated Axon Neural Processing Unit that Nordic says runs machine learning models 10 to 17 times faster than using the chip's 256 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor alone, enabling on-device tasks like keyword spotting, anomaly detection and image classification without an external AI processor. Developers can also build their own small AI models using Nordic's Neuton software, and update models over the air through nRF Cloud.
Two independent radios, a Wi-Fi radio and a 2.4 GHz multiprotocol radio from Nordic's nRF54 Series, let devices maintain a Wi-Fi connection to the cloud while simultaneously listening for Bluetooth LE or Thread traffic. The first two chips in the series are the nRF7120, which supports dual-band Wi-Fi 6, and the nRF7120E, which adds tri-band Wi-Fi 6E and the Axon NPU, both with 4 MB of on-chip non-volatile memory and 1 MB of user-accessible RAM. The nRF71 Series is now sampling with selected customers, and Nordic plans to showcase it at the Electronica trade show.
Why it matters
Running Wi-Fi, mesh networking and AI inference together at far lower standby power could make always-connected, battery-powered smart devices far more practical.