The ESP32-E22 tri-band Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4 module has received a Wi-Fi CERTIFIED certificate from the Wi-Fi Alliance, and Espressif has also released WiFi and Bluetooth Linux drivers for the chip.
The ESP32-E22 was first unveiled at CES 2026 with a dual-core RISC-V processor clocked at up to 500 MHz, 1MB RAM, tri-band WiFi 6E tested up to 2.1 Gbps with iperf, and dual-mode Bluetooth 5.4/6.0. While it also features 41 GPIO pins, it’s not mainly designed for IoT projects, but instead targets host-based wireless systems needing WiFi 6E / Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity through PCIe 2.0 or SDIO interfaces. In other words, the ESP32-E22 will likely show on M.2 modules, competing against similar products from MediaTek and Intel.
Espressif has not said which module was tested for the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED certificate, but I suspect it should be the upcoming ESP32-E22-M2-1 M.2 module listed on the company’s website.
From the certificate, it was tested under Linux, rather than Windows, with a range of certifications for network management (WMM, Wi-Fi Agile Multiband), Security (WPA-Personal/Enterprise, WPA3-Personal/Enterprise, Wi-Fi Enhanced Open), and Wi-Fi MAC/PHY, including 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands, and 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax.
The chip was tested in Station mode with 2×2 MIMO, up to 40 MHz channel width at 2.4 GHz, 160 MHz at 5 GHz and 6GHz. I don’t see any access point tests from the certificate; however, AP mode will also be supported.
This brings us to the second part of today’s news: the open-source Linux driver for the ESP32-E22 chip/module. Currently, only station mode over PCIe and Bluetooth over USB are supported, but more is coming:
- Wi-Fi (STA) – PCIe (Supported), SDIO (Not yet)
- Wi-Fi (AP) – PCIe and SDIO (not yet)
- Bluetooth BR/EDR and BLE over USB – Supported
- Bluetooth over UART – Not yet
- Firmware download over PCIe or USB – Supported
- Secure Download – Not yet
- Wi-Fi/BT coexistence – Not yet
- Suspend/Resume (sleep) – Not yet
The company says it works with Linux 5.14 and greater, but I suppose it will have to be upstreamed eventually and backported to popular Linux distributions, considering the target applications, as you don’t want users to build the code from source each time a new kernel is released, or enable DKMS manually. The GitHub repository also features a binary-only unified firmware for both the ESP32-E22 Linux driver and Windows driver.
The product page on the Espressif Systems website has limited information, and neither the ESP32-E22 chip nor the ESP32-E22-M2-1 M.2 module appear to be for sale for now.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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