Features of nRF70 Series
Introduction
The nRF70 Series of wireless companion ICs add Wi-Fi capabilities to another System-on-Chip (SoC), Microprocessor Unit (MPU), or Microcontroller (MCU) host device. It implements the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Controller (MAC) layers of the IEEE 802.11 protocol stack, while the higher layers of the networking stack run on the host device. The nRF70 series wireless companion IC includes the RF front end and power management function.
The nRF70 series devices are designed for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and are ideal for adding modern Wi-Fi 6 capabilities to existing Bluetooth® Low Energy, Thread, or Zigbee systems, as well as adding Wi-Fi Access Point scanning capabilities to LTE/GPS systems.
For additional information, see the following documentation:
The introductory documentation if you are not familiar with the nRF Connect SDK and the development environment.
The following figure illustrates the partitioning of the Wi-Fi stack between the nRF70 series device and the host device:
Overview of nRF70 application architecture
Supported boards
Devices in the nRF70 Series are supported by the following boards in the Zephyr open source project and in nRF Connect SDK.
DK or Prototype platform |
PCA number |
Build target |
Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
nRF7002 DK |
PCA10143 |
|
Supported Wi-Fi standards and modes
The nRF70 series wireless companion ICs add Wi-Fi 6 support to a host device that includes IP-based networking support. Wi-Fi 6 aligns with IEEE 802.11ax and all earlier versions of the IEEE 802.11 suite of wireless LAN standards.
Currently only Station (STA) support is included. Access Point (AP) and peer-to-peer support in the form of Wi-Fi Direct will be available in the future.