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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Wow, a new contender with what seems to be a bespoke implementation, at least in terms of the drivers (I think in radio as well)!
That’s a very good news! There already was a firmware and a driver from Espressif to use current ESP32 boards as a Wi-Fi modules, now they released a proper one!
I used embedded Wi-Fi modules from many manufacturers, and all of them are quite buggy, thanks in no small part to design relicensing, which leads to the same bugs across all firmwares/drivers. Even Infenion/Cypress (Broadcom licensee) modules in Raspberry Pi are not free of fatal kernel oopsing bugs triggered over Wi-Fi.
I’m in. Shouldn’t be too difficult to throw it in a bootc build until it’s upstreamed.
Definitely on my shopping list for the time when AP works.
This is a huge deal! Can this finally be a successor to the fully open source ath9k drivers (before Qualcomm swallowed up Atheros then locked down the hardware). People looking to upgrade their wifi to more modern specs but still remain open source now have an new avenue. Simply amazing Espressif! Really need that ESP32-E22-M2-1 M.2 card now for a planned openwrt build. Thanks for the heads up.
Hopefully the performance is on par with other manufacturers. Would be very cool to have 4-5 of these in an oss openwrt device
*mic drop*
I guess to get this legally opened up you would have to declare the silicon to be a proprietary RF device only and document the registers and hope for the OS community to write a FW/driver, so you would have a free fw probably even with CE stamp as long as you don’t need a wifi logo…
For a niche market probably not economically relevant.
As mentioned in the article, the firmware is closed-source, so it’s not much different than most other Linux WiFi drivers in that regard.
The article reads like the software controlling the actual radio hardware (aka firmware) is not open source. Rather, only some driver that interfaces to that closed-source blob is, and that driver still seems to be in an incomplete state as regards functionality. Is that so or did I misinterpret the article?
As with all esp32 wifi chips so far the wifi part of the firmware has always been a blob.
Unfortunately it seems without that limitation no radio regulator is willing to give the stamp.
But better OS driver running on my CPU and blobby documented FW on the card, than binary / undocumented driver on my CPU provoking tons of kernel oopses.
And yes, the driver seems to be in an early state, far from feature complete and still out of tree. Thus my remarks about my shopping list.
It’s quite poetic that the ESP chips have came full circle. According to this post [1], the first of them all, ESP8266, has a SDIO boot mode from its heritage as a wifi interface chip. Well, now this use case is back in full force, with 6E, tri band, Bluetooth, and even PCIe.
[1]: https://41j.com/blog/2016/08/the-esp8266-and-sd-cards/
And don’t forget, Espressif has already announced a WiFi 8 chip as well (on their Chinese language news site). No model number yet, but it’ll essentially be a souped-up E22 with *simultaneous* tri-band (which is what WiFi 8 is, more or less).
The investors’ report also mentions WiFi 7, so I assume that one may come before the WiFi 8 chip.