nRF7001 is a wireless companion IC that adds low-power Wi-Fi 6 capabilities to another System on Chip (SoC), Memory Protection Unit (MPU), or Microcontroller Unit (MCU) host. It implements the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers of the 802.11 protocol stack, while the higher layers of the networking stack run on the host.
nRF7001 is compatible with IEEE 802.11ax (also known as Wi-Fi 6) and with earlier standards IEEE 802.11 b/g/n.
nRF7001 has been designed for IoT applications, and is ideal for adding modern Wi-Fi 6 capabilities to existing Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, or Zigbee systems.
Nordic Semiconductor provides reference host support implementations for nRF52840 and nRF5340, but nRF7001 may also be used with other hosts with sufficient processing and memory capacity. It connects to the host SoC or MCU through a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) or Quad Serial Peripheral Interface (QSPI) serial interface (which can optionally be encrypted) and supports coexistence with other radio protocols through a dedicated 3-wire or 4-wire coexistence interface.
nRF7001 supports single-band 2.4 GHz operation. The antenna port is single-ended 50 Ω.
nRF7001 supports 20 MHz wide channels, 1x1 Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) operation and can deliver a PHY data rate of 86 Mbps (MCS7). It supports Station and Wi-Fi Direct operation modes as well as Software Enabled Access Point (SoftAP) (Wi-Fi 4 operation only) and simultaneous Station + SoftAP
NORDIC NRF7001-QFAA-R7