u-blox NORA-W10 Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 module

The u-blox NORA-W10 Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 module targets applications in harsh industrial environments where good RF performance and small size are critical, as well as medical equipment, smart city solutions, and warehouse and retail applications.

The product is the successor of the NINA-W10 module, with key feature additions such as Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.0, improved RF performance, built-in high-capacity flash memory and low power consumption. The compact module builds on the Espressif ES32-S3 chipset, which hosts a powerful dual-core MCU with artificial intelligence hardware acceleration capable of enabling speech and face recognition applications at the edge. It offers a wide range of hardware interfaces, including USB, CAN, SDIO, and display and camera interfaces.

Offering single-band 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 (802.11b/g/n), the module targets lower-end Wi-Fi segments that do not require the higher performance of Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 modules. Even when communicating over Wi-Fi, the device can concurrently transmit data over Bluetooth low energy 5.0, which offers data rates up to 2 Mbps or, using Bluetooth Long Range, can increase signal propagation distances up to four-fold compared to standard Bluetooth LE. Bluetooth mesh support further extends achievable coverage by relaying messages from node to node until they reach their intended destination.

The module’s dual-core Xtensa LX7 MCU is complemented by 8 MB of flash memory, 512 KB of RAM and a total of 38 programmable GPIOs. Security features, including accelerated cryptographic flash encryption capabilities and secure boot, allow the globally certified device to securely run sensitive applications in a trusted and isolated environment. With sufficient flash to support over-the-air updates, the module offers a range of integration possibilities.

The module, which measures 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.8 mm, comes either with a PCB trace antenna or antenna pins. Pin/pad compatibility across the u-blox NORA module family allows product developers to address multiple market segments using the same PCB design.