Stripped-down 2.4GHz-only Wi-Fi 6 radio chip for lower cost designs

“nRF7001 lowers the cost of the bill-of-materials for designs requiring single band capability for smart home, smart city, industrial automation and other low power Wi-Fi IoT applications”, it said. It “offers all the Wi-Fi functionality of the nRF7002, including compliance with the latest standard and power saving features”.

As a radio companion, it can be used with the company’s nRF52 (Nordic suggests the nRF52840) and nRF53 multi-protocol systems-on-chip ICs, the nRF9160 cellular IoT (LTE-M/NB-IoT) system-in-package, and third-party comms ICs.

Amongst its features are secured Wi-Fi connectivity, Wi-Fi-assisted location based on SSID (service set identifier) scanning, Station (STA), software-emulated Access Point (SoftAP), Wi-Fi Direct operation and compatibility with Wi-Fi 4 (IEEE 802.11b, a, g, n) as well as Wi-Fi 6 (ax). Target Wake Time (TWT) is supported for power saving.

Interfacing with its host is via SPI or Quad SPI (QSPI), and the output is a single spatial stream, 20MHz channel bandwidth, 64 QAM (MCS7), OFDMA, up to 86Mbit/s PHY throughput and BSS colouring.

Packaging is 6 x 6mm QFN.

To support design, the existing nRF7002 development kit can be used, as nRF7001 emulation on that is supported by the ‘nRF Connect’ SDK (software development kit).

The nRF7001 product page can be found here