Next-Generation Wireless SoCs Power the Future of Consumer and Industrial IoT

The relentless proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across both consumer and industrial markets is fueling an unprecedented demand for next-generation wireless chips. As the electronic design landscape shifts to accommodate accelerating market requirements for advanced connectivity standards—including Wi-Fi 6 and 7, Bluetooth 5.x and 6, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), and sophisticated edge AI applications—semiconductor manufacturers are under mounting pressure to deliver highly integrated, multi-protocol wireless system-on-chips (SoCs).

According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, the global wireless connectivity chipset market is poised for robust expansion. The market size is forecast to grow from $9.3 billion in 2025 to $10 billion in 2026, ultimately reaching $14.6 billion by 2031. This trajectory represents a compound annual growth rate of 7.72% over the 2026–2031 forecast period. Industry analysts attribute this steady upward trend to the rapid integration of multi-protocol functionality into single-chip solutions, a surging demand for edge AI processing at the device level, and a notable expansion in automotive telematics applications.

Against this dynamic backdrop, major semiconductor companies have introduced a wave of advanced wireless chips designed specifically to target modern consumer and industrial IoT use cases. These newly minted solutions emphasize high levels of hardware integration, exceptionally low power consumption, and robust, enterprise-grade security features capable of meeting evolving global regulatory standards.

Low power consumption remains a foundational requirement for battery-powered IoT devices, driving silicon vendors to continuously refine their power architectures. Capitalizing on this necessity, Silicon Labs recently developed its lowest-power Bluetooth LE wireless SoC to date, engineered to deliver expanded capabilities through higher component integration. The new Series 2 BG2B builds directly upon the foundation laid by existing Series 2 devices—such as the BG22, BG24, and BG27—and targets high-growth applications including secure ranging, asset tracking, electronic shelf labels, smart home environments, industrial monitoring systems, and advanced vehicle diagnostics.

The introduction of this Bluetooth 6 SoC directly addresses the industry-wide call for enhanced power efficiency, tighter security protocols, and streamlined integration. By leveraging Silicon Labs’ most advanced low-power Bluetooth architecture, the BG2B incorporates a comprehensive feature set highlighted by Bluetooth Channel Sounding support, Secure Vault High security, and a rich array of integrated peripherals, including CAN-FD controllers, LED drivers, and dual analog-to-digital converters.

According to Silicon Labs, battery life continues to be one of the most formidable engineering challenges for developers of battery-powered IoT products, particularly as devices take on increasingly complex sensing tasks, local intelligence workloads, and continuous wireless communication. To combat this constraint, the BG2B utilizes a sophisticated dual-output DC/DC power architecture alongside a multi-core design. This approach dramatically improves energy efficiency across active, receive, and sleep operational modes.

As the lowest-power Bluetooth LE device within Silicon Labs’ extensive product portfolio, the BG2B delivers a 14% to 15% reduction in microcontroller active current, significantly lower Bluetooth receive current, and an exceptionally low 1.1-microampere EM2 sleep current with full RAM retention when compared against the company’s previous generation of low-power Bluetooth LE SoCs. By stretching battery lifespans significantly, the chip is exceptionally well-suited for deployment in wireless sensors, asset tracking tags, smart locks, remote controls, wearable devices, and electronic shelf labels.

Furthermore, the wireless SoC provides native support for advanced Bluetooth Channel Sounding capabilities, including Mode 3, the Normalized Attack Detector Metric, and the Inline Phase Correction Term, which are critical for precision location-aware products. Silicon Labs noted that the chip complies fully with Bluetooth Channel Sounding specifications set forth by industry giants Apple and Google, thereby guaranteeing seamless interoperability across leading mobile ecosystems. To accelerate time-to-market, the company’s comprehensive Channel Sounding development solution includes a royalty-free ranging library, specialized software tools, and dedicated engineering support.

Through shorter Channel Sounding step timings, reduced active current, and lower Bluetooth LE receive current, the BG2B achieves a noticeably lower expenditure of energy per ranging event. Beyond power savings, the high level of peripheral integration aids developers in driving down overall bill-of-materials costs while minimizing printed-circuit-board footprint. By integrating Bluetooth LE alongside a CAN-FD interface, for instance, the chip enables direct wireless diagnostics and monitoring for commercial transport fleets, industrial machinery, and maintenance infrastructure without necessitating a separate, external Bluetooth bridge device.

The BG2B design further integrates an LED boost capability alongside four-channel LED sink configurations, successfully eliminating the need for external discrete LED driver circuitry. It also features dual 12-bit ADCs capable of simultaneous analog sampling, as well as a variable resistive load designed to facilitate more accurate battery health estimations. Expanded internal memory and a broad complement of communication peripherals round out the hardware package.

On the security front, the BG2B incorporates Silicon Labs’ proprietary Secure Vault technology to shield device identities, firmware binaries, cryptographic keys, and sensitive user data from sophisticated tampering. The architecture supports PSA Level 3 compliance, providing a crucial advantage for manufacturers aiming to satisfy rigorous emerging security legislation, such as the European Union Cyber Resilience Act. Additionally, through the company’s Custom Part Manufacturing Service, developers can securely provision devices with unique cryptographic credentials, certificates, and identities during the initial manufacturing stage.

Housed in compact QFN40 and QFN48 package options, the BG2B wireless SoCs are slated for initial production hardware rollouts—including fully integrated modules—in 2027.

The industry-wide race toward multi-protocol functionality is equally evident in the convergence of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth LE technologies, an area where several key chipmakers have concentrated their engineering efforts. Earlier in the year, Synaptics Inc. unveiled the SYN765x, an AI-native Wi-Fi 7 wireless microcontroller designed specifically for IoT edge applications spanning smart appliances, home automation systems, and industrial environments. This technological development coincided with significant corporate maneuvers in the sector, highlighted by onsemi’s announcement of its planned acquisition of Synaptics in a multi-billion-dollar transaction.

The high-performance wireless connectivity chip offers single-chip integration that successfully reduces required system board space while simplifying overall schematic design. By incorporating Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth LE 6.0, and Thread/Zigbee protocols across the 2.4-, 5-, and 6-GHz frequency bands, the SYN765x provides exceptional operational flexibility. Crucially, the chip features dedicated on-chip acceleration capable of handling predefined AI-native control and signal-processing functions. This offloads considerable computational overhead from the host processor, helping embedded systems meet stringent latency and power consumption boundaries.

Synaptics observed that historical power and cost constraints have frequently hindered the rapid adoption of cutting-edge Wi-Fi standards within resource-constrained embedded systems. By bringing advanced Wi-Fi 7 capabilities into low-power designs, the SYN765x empowers developers to leverage lower latency, seamless band switching, secure reconnections, and direct access to the uncongested 6-GHz spectrum.

The SYN765x also opens the door to advanced wireless sensing capabilities, including ambient presence detection, motion tracking, and proximity awareness, achieved entirely through standard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals without requiring dedicated hardware sensors. The chip accomplishes this by extracting high-accuracy Channel State Information and pairing it with on-device machine learning algorithms tailored for Wi-Fi sensing workloads.

For distance measurement, the chip relies on Bluetooth Channel Sounding to deliver accurate, power-efficient spatial awareness under typical operating conditions, presenting a cost-effective alternative to more expensive technologies like millimeter-wave radar or ultra-wideband. Furthermore, by integrating logic, digital signal processing, and neural processing unit resources into a single package, Synaptics has created a potent platform for embedded edge AI processing.

The SYN765x supports multiple deployment models: it can act as an intelligent co-processor alongside a primary host application processor or microcontroller, or operate entirely in a standalone, host-less configuration thanks to its generous on-chip memory and processing resources. By eliminating the need for an external microcontroller in numerous product designs, the device effectively curtails system complexity and manufacturing costs for battery-operated IoT products.

Offering concurrent operation across Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread, the triple-combo device also incorporates low-noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, and transmit/receive switches directly on the chip. Broad peripheral support covers UART, SPI, SDIO, I2C, I2S, USB, general-purpose input/outputs, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and pulse-density modulation interfaces. Housed in a compact QFN package measuring less than 100 square millimeters, volume production for the SYN765x is anticipated in the final quarter of 2026, with developer kits already made available to the engineering community.

Expanding the scope of high-integration processors, Espressif Systems recently confirmed that its ESP32-S31 dual-core RISC-V SoC has officially entered mass production. Tailored for next-generation AIoT applications, the wireless SoC is aimed squarely at smart home hubs, voice-controlled smart speakers, edge AI hardware, and industrial automation control systems.

Originally announced earlier in the year, the ESP32-S31 integrates Wi-Fi 6 operating on the 2.4-GHz band, Bluetooth 5.4—with support for LE Audio and Classic BR/EDR—IEEE 802.15.4 protocols like Zigbee and Thread, and a native Gigabit Ethernet MAC. The architecture also provides comprehensive protocol support for Matter over both Wi-Fi and Thread connections.

At its core, the ESP32-S31 features a dual-core, 32-bit RISC-V central processing unit capable of clock speeds up to 320 MHz. One of the processing cores features a 128-bit data path and a specialized SIMD instruction set engineered to accelerate computational performance. The silicon also integrates a 40-MHz low-power co-processor, 512 kilobytes of on-chip static RAM, support for high-speed 250-MHz DDR PSRAM memory expansion, and up to 60 configurable general-purpose input/output pins.

Addressing human-machine interface demands, the wireless chip supplies dedicated hardware interfaces capable of driving DVP cameras and various LCD display formats, alongside support for up to 14 capacitive-touch sensing channels. Dedicated hardware accelerators, including an integrated JPEG encoder/decoder and a 2D graphics accelerator, bolster multimedia performance, while dual I2S controllers ensure precise, hardware-level Bluetooth audio synchronization.

Security implementations on the ESP32-S31 include secure key management driven by RAM-based physically unclonable functions, secure boot routines, flash and PSRAM encryption, a digital signature peripheral, and comprehensive cryptographic hardware acceleration designed to thwart side-channel attacks and power-glitch manipulation. A dedicated Trusted Execution Environment equipped with Access Permission Management allows for rigorous software isolation, facilitating secure multi-application deployments in commercial environments.

Development is supported through Espressif’s established ESP-IDF software framework, alongside compatibility with the broader company software ecosystem, which encompasses ESP-Matter, ESP-GMF, ESP-BLE-MESH, and ESP-BLE-AUDIO solutions. Alternatively, the chip can be deployed as a dedicated connectivity co-processor utilizing ESP-Hosted and ESP-AT software packages.

For developers seeking robust, entry-level wireless silicon tailored to cost-sensitive consumer electronics, Nordic Semiconductor has expanded its nRF54L product series with a versatile multi-protocol SoC. The new nRF54LC10A is built to accommodate size- and cost-constrained IoT devices while supporting Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth Channel Sounding, Thread, Zigbee, and Matter standards.

Optimized for ultra-low-power consumption, the nRF54LC10A targets compact consumer products such as tracking tags, wearable asset locators, and environmental smart home sensors. Nordic engineered the chip to hit stringent physical size and economic targets without compromising on protocol versatility, security features, or software ecosystem depth.

As the smallest ultra-low-power multi-protocol SoC within the nRF54L family, the entry-level nRF54LC10A combines a streamlined microcontroller architecture—anchored by a 128-MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core backed by a RISC-V co-processor—with an advanced multi-protocol radio housed within a tiny 1.9 by 2.3-millimeter chip-scale package. Key technical specifications include 1 megabyte of nonvolatile memory, 192 kilobytes of RAM, and essential peripheral interfaces such as SPI, TWI, UART, and an analog-to-digital converter.

Fabricated on an advanced 22-nanometer process node, the SoC integrates Nordic’s low-leakage RAM technology and refined multi-protocol radio design. The onboard radio consumes 4.0 milliamps during receive operations and 5.8 milliamps during transmit operations at 0 dBm, pushing a maximum transmission power output of +4 dBm. Radio sensitivities are rated at −97 dBm for Bluetooth LE 1M and −101 dBm for 802.15.4 transmissions, while sleep-mode current draw spans from 0.5 to 1.6 microamps.

Security provisions on the nRF54LC10A leverage Arm TrustZone isolation combined with robust physical attack protections. Furthermore, the chip integrates seamlessly with firmware-over-the-air update mechanisms and remote device observability tools offered through Nordic’s nRF Cloud services, enabling manufacturers to comply with emerging regulatory mandates and maintain field-deployed hardware securely over its lifecycle.

Because every device within the nRF54L Series utilizes consistent wireless protocol stacks, embedded software libraries, and development tools, embedded engineers retain the flexibility to scale and upgrade their product designs as project requirements evolve. The nRF54LC10A is offered in three distinct package variants, including a pair of 1.9 by 2.3-millimeter chip-scale packages and a standard QFN option. Engineering samples are currently available, with volume production expected by the second quarter of 2027 and general availability of development kits planned for early 2027.