Espressif shows ESP32-E22 Wi-Fi 6E and ESP32-H21 at CES
Espressif has used CES 2026 to preview two upcoming wireless chips that pull the ESP32 family in opposite directions: higher-throughput networking on one side and ultra-low-power sensor nodes on the other. The headline part is the ESP32-E22 Wi-Fi 6E, which has been teased for months but is now attached to concrete (if still early) numbers and board photos in these CES booth photos and early bullet-point specs.
Based on what’s been shown so far, ESP32-E22 Wi-Fi 6E is a dual-core RISC-V design clocked up to 500 MHz with 1 MB on-chip memory and no optional PSRAM mentioned. On the radio side, it’s described as tri-band 2.4/5/6 GHz Wi-Fi 6E with 160 MHz channels and 2×2 MIMO, with a claimed physical throughput of up to 2.1 Gbps in iperf testing. It also adds dual-mode Bluetooth 6.0 (LE plus BR/EDR) and exposes a fairly “host-friendly” set of interfaces — PCIe, USB and SDIO — explicitly positioning it as a possible connectivity co-processor as well as a standalone SoC.
That combination matters because tri-band 6 GHz capability is the point where ESP32 starts to overlap with designs that previously nudged engineers towards larger Linux modules or dedicated Wi-Fi chipsets. If ESP32-E22 Wi-Fi 6E lands close to these early specs in production silicon, the obvious homes are high-bandwidth endpoints and bridges: premium gateways, streaming-adjacent devices, and controllers that can actually benefit from the extra spectrum and wider channels.
The second part on show, ESP32-H21, aims at the opposite end of the power and size envelope: a single-core RISC-V MCU at 96 MHz with 320 KB RAM, Bluetooth LE plus IEEE 802.15.4 for Zigbee/Thread, integrated RF, and a DC-DC converter intended to support operation at lower voltages. The positioning is straightforward: small IoT nodes, wearables and presence sensing where sleep current, wake time and battery chemistry matter more than headline throughput.
A couple of supporting signals line up with this roadmap. Espressif previously flagged its move into this space in its July 2025 market-entry statement, and the appearance of full chip support in tooling in recent flashing-tool release notes suggests ESP32-H21 is already far enough along to be in real hands. And, when we looked at Espressif’s move to RISC-V, the subtext was always that the company could scale that strategy up as well as down; ESP32-E22 Wi-Fi 6E looks like the “scale up” answer.
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