Nordic Semiconductor has introduced the nRF71 series of Wi-Fi SoCs, designed to perform AI inference directly on the chip. The series includes two models: the nRF7120, which supports dual-band Wi-Fi 6, and the nRF7120E, which features tri-band Wi-Fi 6E connectivity.
Both variants are equipped with an Axon NPU specifically for accelerating edge AI tasks. The chips support Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, and Matter protocols. They also come with 4MB of on-chip non-volatile memory and 1MB of user-accessible memory.
The nRF71 series offers significant power efficiency improvements over the previous nRF70 generation, with standby power consumption reduced by up to 20 times. The integrated NPU allows devices to handle keyword detection, anomaly detection, and image classification locally.
