u-blox NORA-W40 Stand-Alone Wi-Fi® 6 Multiradio Modules
u-blox NORA-W40 Stand-Alone Wi-Fi® 6 Multiradio Modules are small, single-band Wi-Fi 6 and BLUETOOTH® Low Energy wireless microcontroller unit (MCU) modules based on Espressif's ESP32-C6 System-on-Chip (SoC). Compared to earlier Wi-Fi generations, the u-blox NORA-W40 modules feature improved network efficiency, latency, range, and power consumption. BLUETOOTH Low Energy 5.3, Zigbee®, and the Thread mesh networking protocol make NORA-W40 suited to many use cases. The Matter application protocol is supported over Thread and Wi-Fi, allowing interoperability in a growing ecosystem of various smart home products. These modules are ideal for users looking to add advanced wireless connectivity to end products. These modules are ideally suited to a wide range of applications, including low-power wireless sensors, industrial automation, smart buildings/homes, smart cities, healthcare/medical devices, telematics, and point-of-sales.
The open CPU configuration embeds a RISC-V MCU, clocked up to 160MHz, with 512kB SRAM and 4/8MB flash. With many peripheral interfaces, NORA-W40 can operate completely stand-alone, hosting advanced software applications for various use cases. NORA-W40 has a separate low-power (LP) RISC-V co-processor, LP I2C, and LP UART, making it a perfect fit for low-power sensor applications. These modules are ideally suited to a wide range of applications, including low-power wireless sensors, industrial automation, smart buildings/homes, smart cities, healthcare/medical devices, telematics, and point-of-sales.
The NORA-W40 devices include hardware security features like secure boot with a hardware root of trust, a trusted execution environment controller, cryptographic hardware accelerators, encrypted flash, and protection of the debug port. Wireless communication can be secured with WPA2/WPA3 authentication, Wi-Fi enterprise security, TLS encryption, HTTPS, and BLUETOOTH LE secure connection pairing.
The NORA-W406 modules feature an internal PCB antenna that provides a robust low-profile solution with high performance and an extensive range, while NORA-W401 has a module pin to connect to an external antenna of choice. The modules are globally certified for use with the internal antenna or a range of external antennas. This reduces time, cost, and effort for users integrating Wi-Fi, BLUETOOTH Low Energy, and Thread into products.
Features
- Wireless MCU modules for cost-efficient designs
- Single-band Wi-Fi 6, BLUETOOTH Low Energy 5.3, Zigbee, and Thread
- Supports Wi-Fi 6 Target Wake Time and other low-power peripherals
- Small footprint, multiple antenna options, and pin compatible with other NORA modules
- Full set of enhanced security features
- Matter over Wi-Fi or Thread
- Variants
- NORA-W401 - multiradio wireless MCU module with antenna pin
- NORA-W406 - multiradio wireless MCU module with internal PCB antenna
- Global certification
Applications
- Wi-Fi networks
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- BLUETOOTH Low Energy (BLE)
- Telematics
- Point-of-Sales (POS)
- Medical and industrial networks
- Access to laptops, mobile phones, and similar consumer devices
- Home/building automation
- Wireless gateways
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Facial recognition
Specifications
- IEEE® 802.11 b/g/n/ax Wi-Fi standards
- 2.4GHz Wi-Fi channels 1 to 14 (depending on region)
- Wi-Fi maximum transfer rates
- 11Mbit/s for IEEE 802.11b
- 54Mbit/s for IEEE 802.11g
- 72Mbit/s for IEEE 802.11n
- 115Mbit/s for IEEE 802.11ax
- BLUETOOTH Low Energy v5.3
- 125kbps, 500kbps, 1Mbps, and 2Mbps BLUETOOTH PHY rates
- Output power (conducted)
- 17dBm for Wi-Fi 2.4GHz
- 7dBm for BLUETOOTH
- Sensitivity
- -97dBm for Wi-Fi 2.4GHz
- -98dBm for BLUETOOTH
- Internal PCB antenna or antenna pin for connecting to an external antenna
- Electrical
- 3.3V (±10%) power supply
- Power consumption
- 252mA (100% duty cycle) for Wi-Fi TX 802.11ax MCS9 at 16.5dBm
- 130mA (100% duty cycle) for BLUETOOTH LE TX at 0dBm
- 78mA for Wi-Fi RX
- 180μA for light sleep mode
- 7μA for deep sleep mode
- Package
- 10.4mm x 14.3mm x 1.9mm size
- Machine-mountable solder pins
- Environmental data, quality, and reliability
- -40°C to +85°C operating temperature range
- 5% to 90% relative humidity (RH) non-condensing
- RoHS 2 and RoHS 3
- Open CPU for customer applications - Customers develop and embed their own applications on the NORA-W40 modules using the ESP-IDF (open CPU concept), these hardware features can be enabled by the NORA-W40 modules
- MCU system
- 160MHz RISC-V application processor
- 20MHz RISC-V LP co-processor
- 512kB SRAM, 4/8MB Flash
- Hardware interfaces
- UART
- SPI
- SDIO
- TWAI® (CAN 2.0 compatible)
- I2C
- I2S
- JTAG over USB
- GPIO
- ADC
- Low-power I2C
- Low-power UART
- Security
- Trusted execution environment
- Hardware cryptographic accelerator
- Secure bootloader
- External memory encryption
- Flash encryption
- Random number generator (RNG)
- OTP, 4kB
- Secure debug interface
- ESP-IDF SDK development environment
- MCU system
Block Diagram
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Related Development Tools
u-blox EVK-NORA-W40 Evaluation Kits
Evaluates the stand-alone, single-band Wi-Fi® 6 and BLUETOOTH® Low Energy wireless MCU modules.