Nordic nRF71 brings Wi-Fi, Thread and edge AI to battery devices | Magica
Nordic samples nRF71 Wi-Fi and AI chips, claiming up to 20 times lower standby power
Editorial Team
••📖7 min read
Nordic Semiconductor is sampling nRF71 chips combining Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE and Thread, with an AI accelerator in the higher-end variant. Its claimed standby-power improvement targets battery devices, but software maturity and real-world energy use remain key tests.
Nordic claims up to 20 times lower standby power than its nRF70 Wi-Fi products, rather than a measured improvement in complete-device battery life.
The nRF7120E adds Wi-Fi 6E and an Axon AI accelerator; the nRF7120 offers dual-band Wi-Fi 6.
Chips and partner modules are sampling with selected customers, while SDK documentation calls Wi-Fi support experimental.
Nordic Semiconductor, a low-power wireless chip supplier building on its Bluetooth LE platform, announced its nRF71 system-on-chip family on November 3, bringing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy and Thread connectivity together with application processing. The company says standby power is up to 20 times lower than in its current nRF70 Wi-Fi products. Hardware acceleration for on-device AI comes in the nRF7120E variant.
The target is a demanding class of products: smart locks, wearables and industrial sensors that need network access and local processing without frequent battery replacement. Integration could reduce the need for separate processing components. But Nordic’s announcement is a selected-customer sampling milestone, and its power claim does not establish years of battery life for any particular finished product.
Nordic’s nRF71 architecture combines an application domain and a dedicated Wi-Fi subsystem. Diagram: Nordic Semiconductor. Source: nRF Connect SDK documentation.
From a Wi-Fi companion to an integrated application chip
Nordic entered the Wi-Fi chip market in August 2022 with the nRF7002, a companion chip intended to work alongside a host device, according to its launch announcement. The nRF71 brings application processing and multiple wireless technologies into one chip, putting the application and connectivity on a common platform. Its SDK documentation says nRF71 builds on the nRF54L family, inheriting its multiprotocol radio, security features, coprocessor framework and core peripherals. The application processor is a 256 MHz Arm Cortex-M33, alongside a 256 MHz RISC-V coprocessor and a dedicated Wi-Fi subsystem.
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Editorial Team
The two initial parts share 4 MB of on-chip non-volatile memory and 1 MB of user-accessible RAM. The nRF7120 supports Wi-Fi 6 at 2.4 and 5 GHz; the nRF7120E adds the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi 6E and the Axon neural processing unit. That distinction matters: the family announcement’s AI positioning should not be read as an accelerator in every chip.
Nordic says the Wi-Fi radio and its separate 2.4 GHz multiprotocol radio can receive simultaneously, letting a device maintain its Wi-Fi cloud connection while listening for Bluetooth LE or Thread traffic. The SDK documents a 20 MHz Wi-Fi channel bandwidth, a useful qualification to the Wi-Fi 6/6E label for these IoT parts. The company identifies Matter bridges, Thread border routers and battery-powered smart-home hubs among the possible designs.
For AI, Nordic names keyword spotting, anomaly detection and image classification. It claims Axon runs machine-learning models 10 to 17 times faster than the Cortex-M33 alone, while its Neuton software can produce small models for inference on the processor without the accelerator.
The software proposition also reaches beyond the chip. Nordic offers model updates through nRF Cloud, linking local inference to its own deployment services. Processing on the device and maintaining models over the network are complementary parts of this platform.
Company-reported results from Novus Labs, commissioned by Silicon Labs, show SiWx917 connected current under five congestion conditions. These tests cannot rank SiWx917 against nRF71. Source: Novus Labs study commissioned by Silicon Labs.
Standby savings need an operating context
The headline power comparison is against Nordic’s own nRF70 generation. It is neither a comparison against all competing chips nor a claim that every operating mode consumes one-twentieth as much energy.
A technical report covering Nordic’s launch lists average connected current at DTIM 10 of 14 µA on 2.4 GHz and 8 µA on 5 GHz. The report also lists Target Wake Time and a low-power receiver among the power-saving capabilities. The current figures are reported specifications, not whole-product measurements that account for sensing, application work, inference and transmissions over time. Nordic’s announcement does not supply the detailed test conditions needed to turn its standby claim into a battery-life forecast.
Low-power connected Wi-Fi predates this launch. A 2024 study by testing firm Novus Labs, commissioned by competing chip supplier Silicon Labs, evaluated its SiWx917 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE system-on-chip. The tested Wi-Fi connection used the 2.4 GHz band.
In standby-associated MQTT messaging tests across 100 access points, the study’s results table shows average current at 3.3 V of about 90 µA on an uncongested channel and 217 µA at 90% channel utilization. The device checked for data at one-second intervals and used a 55-second MQTT keep-alive interval. Each access point underwent five minutes of testing at each of five congestion levels, with no disconnects reported.
A separate test across 10 access points supporting Target Wake Time, which schedules when a client wakes to exchange data, reported about 49 µA on an uncongested channel. That configuration allowed 30-second latency, so its lower current comes with a different responsiveness setting and test population.
These results cannot rank SiWx917 against nRF71: the access points, wake schedules, workloads and measurement conditions are not matched. They do establish an existing low-power alternative and show why a chip’s connected-current specification alone is insufficient to predict battery life.
The u-blox ALMA-W1 module family uses Nordic’s nRF7120 and nRF7120E chips. Image: u-blox. Source: u-blox.
Modules trade integration work for a packaged platform
Switzerland-based u-blox, a supplier of positioning and short-range communications technology, announced its ALMA-W1 module family on the same day. Built around the nRF7120 and nRF7120E, it extends u-blox’s short-range portfolio into Nordic’s Wi-Fi ecosystem.
Its module announcement offers antenna choices, optional additional flash, an ALMA form factor intended to ease migration between generations, and two software approaches: customizable wireless-MCU operation or network-processor operation using u-connectXpress. The latter supplies pre-flashed, AT-command-based connectivity software, including wireless stacks and security libraries.
That gives product makers an alternative to designing directly around the chip. u-blox describes the modules as globally certified and says they reduce integration effort. Neither company’s announcement supplies chip or module pricing, so the potential saving in design and certification work cannot yet be weighed against component cost from these releases.
The module release also carries a Nordic executive’s claim of more than 20 times lower connected standby current than the previous generation. Nordic’s own announcement uses up to 20 times lower standby power. The releases do not supply measurement details that reconcile those different formulations.
u-blox separately advertises potential AI speed gains of up to 15 times on relevant variants. That comparison is against CPU execution of the same workloads, but the release provides insufficient workload detail to reconcile it with Nordic’s 10-to-17-times range.
The next test is production readiness
Nordic and u-blox both say initial samples are available to selected customers and plan to show their products at Electronica, where Nordic also plans to exhibit its own branded module. The technical report describes ALMA-W1 as still under development; u-blox’s certification claim should therefore be read alongside its selected-customer sampling status. Neither announcement gives a general production-availability date.
Software readiness deserves equal attention. Although the technical report describes the chips as fully supported in nRF Connect SDK and lists SoftAP capability, Nordic’s SDK documentation explicitly calls nRF71 Wi-Fi support experimental and currently lists station and scan functionality. Hardware capability and currently documented software support should therefore be checked separately before a design commitment.
The technical report cites a DigiKey listing of $72.38 for the nRF7120 development kit, with a minimum order of 35 and stock estimated for April 2027. Those are reported distributor terms for a development tool, not chip pricing or Nordic’s production timetable. For prospective buyers, the unresolved decisions are practical: when production quantities and stable software arrive, what the components cost, and whether measured energy use across their own network conditions and AI workloads delivers the promised battery benefit.
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