• Nordic Semiconductor introduced the Nordic Thingy:91 X prototyping platform at CES 2025.
• The company expanded its successful Bluetooth portfolio with the nRF54L series supported with user-friendly software, broad compatibility and strong support.
• Nordic Semiconductor continues to strengthen its position in both cellular and non-cellular IoT, forming key partnerships & customer rolodex across verticals.

Counterpoint Research recently attended CES 2025 and covered multiple companies across the value chain and verticals. Among many of our meetings, we had an opportunity to speak with Nordic Semiconductor’s CEO Vegard Wollan. Nordic Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company that specializes in wireless communication technology, showcased its latest advancements in both long-range and short-range IoT connectivity at the event.

Counterpoint Conversations Video

Nordic Semiconductor is one of the leaders in short range connectivity based on Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, Matter, and other protocols. The company also ventured into long range cellular connectivity a few years ago with its own LPWA (LTE-M, NB-IoT) modem and SoC. Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF9xxx series targets multiple IoT applications for its chipsets going into cellular IoT modules. One of the solutions Nordic Semiconductor announced and showcased at CES2025 was an ‘asset tracking’ prototype platform for potential customers to adopt the company’s cellular platform and peripheral chipsets into its asset trackers.

Nordic Semiconductor's Versatile Asset Tracking Evaluation Platform ‘Nordic Thingy’

• At CES 2025, Nordic Semiconductor unveiled the Nordic Thingy:91 X, a location asset tracking evaluation platform that integrates various chips from its portfolio.
• The platform is built around the nRF9151 System-in-Package (SiP), supporting LTE-M, NB-IoT, GNSS, and NR+ for global connectivity.
• It features connectivity via a USB interface powered by the nRF5340 System-on-a-Chip (SoC), with Bluetooth LE support and the nRF7002 Wi-Fi companion, while power management is handled by the nPM6001 and nPM1300 PMICs.
• The Nordic Thingy:91 X uses nRFCloud for seamless integration, offering Location Services for efficient data computation and supports the nRF Connect SDK for cellular IoT development, including the Zephyr RTOS and various developer tools.
  

In the short-range space, Nordic Semiconductor showcased its latest nRF5xxx series, expanding its portfolio in the Bluetooth LR market with a range of wireless SoC solutions.

Nordic Semiconductor Expands Bluetooth SoC Leadership with nRF54L Series

• At CES 2025, Nordic Semiconductor introduced the nRF54L series at CES 2025, its latest Bluetooth LE 6.0 wireless SoCs, building on the success of the nRF52 series, which sold over 2 billion units.
• The nRF54L series features an ultra-low-power 2.4 GHz radio and a multi-purpose MCU, powered by a 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor, delivering double the processing power and triple the efficiency of the previous generation.
• It also includes a 128 MHz FLPR RISC-V-based coprocessor, with three SoC variants offering memory options of up to 1.5 MB NVM and 256 KB RAM.
• The nRF54L series is now in production and commercially available, expanding Nordic Semiconductor’s range of BLE solutions, targeting next-gen Bluetooth LE applications.
  

Analyst Take:

• Nordic Semiconductor's launches at CES 2025 highlight the company’s focus on consistent innovation in both non-cellular and cellular IoT connectivity.
• In 2018, Nordic Semiconductor expanded its IoT offerings with compact, low-power LTE-M/NB-IoT cellular solutions, diversifying from Bluetooth and proprietary solutions.
• Nordic Semiconductor has formed key partnerships with asset tracker and healthcare device manufacturers in the cellular space. By 2030, the company is expected to hold a significant share of the cellular chipset market.
• With a focus on cellular development, Nordic Semiconductor is set to benefit from the consolidation in the Western cellular IoT market (with companies like Thales-Telit, Sierra-Semtech, and u-blox exiting the cellular module market), opening up opportunities in Cat-1 bis, LTE-M, 5G Redcap, and 5G eRedCap for the company to directly compete with Qualcomm, Sequans, and Sony Altair.
• The Thingy:91 X is a very innovative hardware and software platform, offering a one-stop shop solution for developers to increase their time-to-market.
• Developers can now easily build power-efficient and high-performance asset tracking solutions, while the nRF54L series provides greater flexibility for various Bluetooth IoT-based applications.
• Nordic Semiconductor is one of the leaders in the Bluetooth Low Energy market. It offers a wide range of low-power wireless SoCs with various memory sizes and features, providing the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements during development.
• Its fully certified Bluetooth LE stack supports all features, ensuring smooth, reliable communication with top industry compatibility, including Thread and Matter.
• Nordic Semiconductor offers easy-to-use software, comprehensive support, documentation, and online courses, so users can focus on creating standout IoT products for customers.
• Nordic Semiconductor is one of the vendors to watch out for as it expands in the IoT market with expanding portfolio, capabilities, partnerships and customer rolodex across the verticals

Source: Counterpoint Research