Nordic Semiconductor has announced a chip family aimed at one of the smart home’s oldest trade-offs: Wi-Fi is convenient and widely available, but it has traditionally been too power-hungry for small battery-powered devices. The new nRF71 Series, announced on November 3, 2026, puts Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, and on-device AI onto a single system-on-chip, and Nordic says it cuts standby power by up to 20 times compared with its current nRF70 Series Wi-Fi products.
If the claim holds up in real products, battery-powered locks, sensors, and security panels could stay connected over Wi-Fi without giving up the low-power behavior that has usually pushed them toward Thread, Zigbee, or Bluetooth instead. For now, the nRF71 Series is sampling with selected customers, not shipping in a consumer device you can buy, so the practical test is still ahead.
What Nordic announced
The nRF71 Series is a family of ultra-low-power systems-on-chip, or SoCs, designed for battery-powered Wi-Fi devices. Nordic describes the series as combining Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, and edge AI on one chip, using the same nRF Connect software development kit as its nRF54 and nRF70 Series products. The company is positioning the chips for smart home, wearable, and industrial IoT devices, with an emphasis on products that need to stay connected while running for a long time on a small battery.
The first two chips are the nRF7120 and the nRF7120E. Both include 4 MB of on-chip non-volatile memory and 1 MB of user-accessible RAM, which Nordic says leaves room for the wireless stacks, Matter support, the device application, and firmware updates. Both also use a 256 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor, plus an additional 256 MHz RISC-V coprocessor for real-time tasks and peripheral work, according to technical coverage of the announcement.
The difference between the two chips is in wireless bands and AI hardware. The nRF7120 supports dual-band Wi-Fi 6 at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The nRF7120E adds the 6 GHz band for tri-band Wi-Fi 6E and includes Nordic’s Axon neural processing unit for hardware-accelerated edge AI. The base nRF7120 has no dedicated AI accelerator, but Nordic says it can still run very small AI models built with its Neuton software, which is designed for inference on the application processor alone.
Why two radios matter
One of the more interesting design choices is that the nRF71 chips use two independent radios, each with its own radio-frequency and processing blocks. One radio handles Wi-Fi, while the other is a 2.4 GHz multiprotocol radio derived from Nordic’s latest nRF54 Series wireless chips. Because the radios can receive at the same time, a device can maintain its Wi-Fi connection to the cloud while still listening for Bluetooth Low Energy or Thread traffic, without making one protocol wait for the other to finish.
That simultaneous operation is relevant for Matter. Both chips support Matter, and Nordic notes that for a Matter-over-Wi-Fi device, Bluetooth Low Energy can handle commissioning while Wi-Fi provides the network connection. A Matter bridge or Thread border router built around the nRF71 could therefore run Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth Low Energy on a single chip, rather than combining separate components for each radio.
Nordic also reports very low connected standby current figures: an average current while connected at DTIM 10 of 14 microamps at 2.4 GHz and 8 microamps at 5 GHz for both SoCs. DTIM is a Wi-Fi power-saving mechanism that lets a device sleep between beacon intervals, so the figure describes a device that stays reachable without keeping its radio fully awake. As with the headline 20-times standby improvement, this is a vendor specification for the chip, not a measured battery life for a finished product, and real-world results will depend on the device design, network conditions, and how often the device wakes up.
Edge AI on a battery-powered chip
The second half of the announcement is edge AI: running machine-learning inference on the device itself, rather than sending raw sensor or audio data to the cloud for processing. Nordic says the Axon neural processing unit in the nRF7120E runs machine-learning models 10 to 17 times faster than the 256 MHz Cortex-M33 processor alone. The company lists keyword spotting, anomaly detection, and image classification as practical workloads on battery-powered devices using the series.
Processing locally has two potential benefits: a device can respond faster, without waiting for a round trip to a server, and it can send only the result of its analysis, rather than a continuous stream of data, saving power and bandwidth. Nordic also points to over-the-air model updates through nRF Cloud.
For homeowners, the most relatable examples are likely to be familiar ones: a sensor that can tell the difference between normal and unusual patterns, a voice device that recognizes a wake word without streaming audio continuously, or a security device that classifies what it sees before deciding whether to send an alert. Nordic has not announced a specific consumer product using these features, so these remain use cases the chip is designed to enable, not features already available in a product on store shelves.
What it could mean for the smart home
Nordic explicitly names the smart home categories it has in mind: battery-powered smart home hubs, Matter bridges, and Thread border routers, as well as Matter-enabled smart locks, security panels, wearables, and industrial sensors. Each of these has a different reason to want Wi-Fi without the usual power penalty.
Smart locks are a good example: a lock needs to be reachable for remote control and status updates, but it also needs to run for months on batteries, and it cannot afford to drain those batteries just to stay on the network. A security panel or sensor faces a similar balance, often placed where frequent battery changes or a wired power supply would be impractical.
There is already an early sign of ecosystem interest. On the same day as Nordic’s announcement, u-blox introduced the ALMA-W1 module series, based on the nRF7120 and nRF7120E chips, combining Wi-Fi 6 and 6E with Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4 radios for battery-driven, size-constrained products, including smart home and access-control devices. Modules matter because they let device makers adopt a new chip without designing the radio circuitry from scratch, which can shorten the path from a chip announcement to a finished product.
What to watch before buying anything
There are several reasons to treat this announcement as a beginning rather than a buying guide. First, availability is limited: Nordic says the nRF71 Series is now sampling with selected customers, and developers are directed to contact their local Nordic sales representative for availability information. That is normal for a chip launch, but it means consumer products based on the series are still some way off.
Second, certification is still in progress for the module version. Nordic plans FCC, CE, and Japan certifications for its Nordic-branded module, which packages either SoC with radio-frequency matching and filtering, a transmit and receive switch and diplexer, a 64 MHz crystal, shielding, and a PCB antenna in a 10 by 14 mm package. Those certifications had not yet been completed at announcement time, according to technical coverage.
Third, Nordic has not announced pricing for the chips, and it has not attached a specific battery-life figure to any particular product. The “up to 20 times lower standby power” claim is a comparison against the nRF70 Series, and the connected standby current figures are chip-level specifications. A finished lock, sensor, or hub will still need to be tested on its own merits, including how it behaves on a busy home Wi-Fi network and how its battery holds up over months of real use.
Finally, Wi-Fi is only one part of the smart home connectivity picture. Thread and Matter over Thread already serve many battery-powered devices well, and Zigbee remains common in existing homes. The nRF71 Series is most interesting not because it replaces those options, but because it gives device makers a way to add Wi-Fi to battery-powered products and combine Wi-Fi with Thread and Bluetooth on a single chip.
The bottom line
Nordic’s nRF71 Series is a chip-level announcement, but it addresses a very practical smart home problem: how to keep a battery-powered device connected over Wi-Fi without draining its battery. With Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Matter support, and on-device AI in the higher-end nRF7120E, the series gives manufacturers a new set of options for locks, sensors, security panels, hubs, and bridges. The next step is the one that matters most for homeowners: real products, with real battery-life results, real prices, and independent testing. Until then, the nRF71 is worth watching as a sign of where battery-powered Wi-Fi in the smart home is heading, rather than as a product to wait for by name. Nordic will showcase the series at this year’s Electronica exhibition, in Hall C6, booth 159, which should give device makers their first hands-on look at what the chips can do.