Smart home builders juggling separate boards for WiFi, Thread, Zigbee, and cellular fallback now have a single-slot option to consider. The Simplia CONNECT RW612 is a standard 30 x 22 mm (1.2 x 0.9 inches) M.2 2230 card that folds six wireless standards into one part: dual-band WiFi 6, Bluetooth LE 5.4, an 802.15.4 radio for Thread and Zigbee, LTE Cat-M, NB-IoT, and GNSS positioning. Fitting that many transceivers onto a card sized for a laptop wireless slot is unusual, and it opens the door to a compact IoT gateway or asset tracker that reaches from a local mesh to a cellular uplink without extra hardware.
The module leans on two established parts. The mesh, WiFi, and Bluetooth side comes from a Murata Type 2FR module built around the NXP RW612, a tri-radio wireless MCU pairing an Arm Cortex-M33 running at 260 MHz with 1.2 MB of SRAM, 16 MB or 32 MB of FlexSPI flash, and NXP EdgeLock security. Cellular and satellite connectivity is an optional Quectel BG77 modem covering LTE Cat M1 and NB-IoT alongside GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, and QZSS. Three IPEX connectors break out the cellular, GNSS, and WiFi/BT/802.15.4 antennas, while an M.2 edge connector and a 40-pin Hirose expansion header expose USB 2.0, SD, RMII, UART, I2C, a SIM interface, and GPIOs. The card runs from a single 3.3V supply.
The open source angle is where the RW612 gets interesting. Simplia publishes its hardware design files on GitHub, following the same approach as its earlier CONNECT IMXRT 1052 board. On the firmware side the vendor SDK is described as thin, offering pin muxing and little else, likely built on NXP's MCUXpresso SDK for bare metal or FreeRTOS. The more compelling path for tinkerers is Zephyr RTOS, which supports the RW612 and integrates with Zephyr 4.1 for Matter over WiFi, with the chip's 802.15.4 radio also able to run OpenThread as a Thread 1.4 border router per NXP's Matter releases. That makes the module a plausible foundation for a self-hosted Matter and Thread hub that can also fall back to a cellular link where WiFi is unavailable. One practical note for Zephyr builds: the WiFi, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4 stacks each depend on closed-source firmware blobs from NXP, fetched via west blobs fetch hal_nxp before any wireless function comes online, with separate binary files covering WiFi-only, BLE-only, and BLE-plus-802.15.4 combo configurations. The OpenThread border router sample for the RW61x in Zephyr also ships with a built-in web server and REST API for Thread network management, which reduces the integration work for a self-hosted mesh gateway.
Three SKUs are planned, but only one carries the full complement of radios. The BAR0422 and BAR0622 ship the Murata WiFi and Bluetooth module with 16 MB and 32 MB of flash respectively, while the BAR0423 adds the BG77 modem for the complete six-in-one configuration. Simplia has not announced pricing. For reference, the Murata Type 2FR sells for roughly $14 and the Quectel BG77 for about $20 in 1,000-unit quantities, so a figure near $100 (about €92) would not be surprising for a niche module at low volume.
