Wireless Chipmaker Nordic Launches nRF71 SoC: Integrated NPU, Standby Power One-Twentieth of Wi-Fi Companion ICs

Wireless chipmaker Nordic Semiconductor has announced the nRF71 series of System-on-Chip products, integrating low-power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Thread protocols, and edge AI capabilities into a single chip. Nordic states that the nRF71 series reduces standby power consumption to as low as one-twentieth compared to its existing nRF70 series Wi-Fi companion ICs. This improvement aims to enable battery-powered devices in smart homes, wearables, and industrial IoT to maintain network connectivity while performing local AI inference without requiring additional external processors.

The first products in the nRF71 series include the nRF7120 and nRF7120E models. The nRF7120 supports dual-band Wi-Fi 6, while the nRF7120E adds tri-band Wi-Fi 6E support and integrates a Neural Processing Unit named Axon. According to Nordic, the Axon NPU can accelerate machine learning model execution by 10 to 17 times compared to using only a 256MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor. This makes AI functions such as keyword spotting, anomaly detection, and image classification practical on battery-powered devices. Additionally, the series supports running ultra-small AI models trained on developers' own data via Nordic's Neuton software tools directly on the chip.

In terms of hardware specifications, the nRF71 series features 4MB of on-chip non-volatile memory and 1MB of user-available RAM. To support concurrent multi-protocol operations, the chip contains independent RF circuits and processing blocks, allowing the Wi-Fi radio and the 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio for Bluetooth LE or Thread to receive signals simultaneously. This means devices can process local short-range communication tasks while maintaining cloud Wi-Fi connections, reducing latency and energy consumption caused by waiting for different protocol processes to complete. Samples of the nRF71 series are currently being provided to select customers, and the products will be showcased at electronica in Munich, Germany, from November 10 to 13, 2026.