Nordic Semiconductor on Announcing NTN support and SIM Solution at Embedded World 2025

Wevolver: Hi, my name is Kyran. We're at Embedded World today. I'm part of Wevolver team and I'm at the booth of Nordic Semiconductor with Martin. Martin, could you introduce yourself? 

Martin: Yeah. So, hey, I'm Martin Lesund.I'm a Technical Product Manager for our Cellular IoT devices. That's mainly the nRF91 series. And we have a lot of cool stuff that we show at the booth today. So I'm going to talk about that later. 

Wevolver: Super. Looking forward. Martin, let's talk a bit about the cellular IoT products you've been developing lately at Nordic.

Martin: Yeah. So, this year we have an awesome announcement. We will support non-terrestrial networks (NTN) with our nRF9151. What does that mean? It's basically NB-IoT over satellites. So now you can actually have global coverage. 75% of the world do not have cellular IoT coverage. So in middle of the ocean, for example, you cannot send any messages. So now with NTN you can actually deliver these important messages through the satellites. So that's awesome for asset tracking and supply tracking and basically whenever you don't have LTE-M or NB-IoT connectivity.

Wevolver: I'm curious, do you have any specific case studies you can share with us? 

Martin: Yeah. So it's early days yet. We are still kind of doing internal testing. So, right now, we are in the proof of concept stage. We have partnerships with Iridium, Skylo and Myriota. And today we have this device actually communicating to some satellites to test out how this works, how much power consumption it is. And soon, we will deliver this to our customers to then sample and test out.

Wevolver: Martin, so when is this going to be released to the public and where can people find it?

Martin: Yeah, so all the information we have online on nordicsemi.com/NTN, there we will follow up with all the updates on new partners coming this year and all the different information about LEO satellites and GEO satellite. What does this mean for your use cases and for early sampling? We are targeting second half of this year so customers can try this out and evaluate it and we will make it commercially available a little bit later when we have found out this is a mature solution that anyone can benefit from.

Wevolver: So lately Nordic Semiconductor has worked a lot on SIM solutions. Could you talk a bit more about and also the partnerships you guys are working on?

Martin: Yeah, I can. So SIM cards and SIM connectivity has been a challenge in the cellular IoT space. So we are partnering up with different vendors that have different solutions to try to have a flexible approach to the customers. Either if they need a e-SIM SGP.32 solution where you can download profiles in the field. We have partnered up with Kigen. So Kigen makes a solution and we have a demo showcasing at their booth. So you can see the Kigen logo here. So basically that means you can have a plastic SIM or an e-SIM and launch that in the field and download different profiles if you need to. So that's a very good thing to have. If you have a device that needs to stay in a field for 20 years and suddenly there's some issues with your carriers and you need to change profiles for some reason, then you have the opportunity with the SGP.32 solution.

Another solution, if you want to hear about that, we have partnered up also with Onomondo. So they offer a soft-SIM solution that's a software-based SIM card. So that runs on our application processor in the secure area. So that's just software code, no external components, everything running inside and that gives you the coverage of Onomondo. And then we have our third and also another kind of software integrated solution. So, last week, we were certified. We are nuSIM certified. Basically this is open specification made by Deutsche Telekom and that's a software integrated solution. This runs on the secure area of our device. And what does it mean that we are certified? So, basically, a third-party company did the secure penetration testing for eight weeks and found no vulnerabilities. So we are secure for running the profiles. This also enables you to have  different profiles at the manufacturing line. So you can either provision a Deutsche Telekom profile or potentially new ones in the future. So that's the different approaches we have. 

Wevolver: Awesome. I'm curious to learn a bit more about the application. Could you dive deeper into it? 

Martin: Yeah. So these types of software integrated solutions is very great if you have a size-constrained device where you don't really have the space for an external socket for a plastic SIM or even a e-SIM chip SIM besides the cellular module. So that's a very great use case. Another use case is to kind of ease up the supply when you instead of order plastic SIMs or physical e-SIMs, you can do everything in the software in the manufacturing line. It basically just flash the application, flash the SIM Card, ship the device, and you're good to go.

Wevolver: Last question, I'm a bit curious to know what are some other products in the future that you guys are going to focus on?

Martin: Well, I now think we have kind of solved the issues or are working on solving the issues with SIM cards and coverage. And now we're also looking into 5G and then 6G and especially for low power wireless, low power wide area networks. We are still focusing on this low power technologies like LTE-M and NB-IoT and NTN. But we are also cooking other stuff. So just look out on our webpage (nordicsemi.com) for new updates.

Wevolver: Awesome. Thanks for taking your time. All the best.