Nordic Semiconductor Brand Guidelines: Nordic VLSI, Trondheim 1983 & the nRF Chips

Four graduates and a kitchen table in Trondheim.

Nordic Semiconductor began in Trondheim, Norway, in 1983. English Wikipedia says it was founded as Nordic VLSI by four post-graduates from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU; Norwegian Wikipedia names them as Trond Sæther, Frank Berntsen, Jan Meyer and Oddvar Aaserud and says the company started “around a kitchen table.” VLSI stands for very-large-scale integration, the engineering term for packing many transistors onto one chip.

At first it was a design house. English Wikipedia says Nordic VLSI focused on mixed-signal application-specific integrated circuits — chips designed to order for a single customer — for clients in the Nordic region. In 1996 it went public on the Oslo stock exchange, where, English Wikipedia says, it still trades; its ticker is NOD. In 1998 it released its first standard wireless products, for the 433 MHz band, one of the licence-free ISM radio bands.

The change of name marked a change of direction. English Wikipedia dates the switch to Nordic Semiconductor to 2003, the same year the company released its first wireless chips for the 2.4 GHz band; Norwegian Wikipedia says the Nordic VLSI name was used until 2004. Either way, from then on the company concentrated on ultra-low-power radio chips, and it kept its headquarters in Trondheim. Norwegian Wikipedia lists offices in Oslo and in the United States, Finland, Poland, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.

The nRF families.

The company’s products are wireless systems-on-chip, or SoCs — chips that combine a radio, a processor and memory — and systems-in-package, which combine several chips in one module. Its product names share a prefix: nRF. Early parts such as the nRF24L01+ transceiver used a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, and Norwegian Wikipedia records that Logitech launched its V500 Cordless Notebook Mouse with a Nordic chip in 2004, after earlier gamepads. The same source says cyclists in the 2010 Tour de France used Nordic chips to record heart rate, speed and power, and that the radios in Nofence’s virtual-fence collars for grazing animals come from the company.

Its Bluetooth Low Energy chips came in generations. English Wikipedia dates the nRF51 series to 2012, built around an Arm Cortex-M microcontroller core; the nRF52 series, with a Cortex-M4 core, to 2015; and the nRF53 series, with two Cortex-M33 cores and a radio for several protocols, to November 2019. In October 2023 the company announced the nRF54L, part of a fourth generation, the nRF54. English Wikipedia says the nRF54H series is made on GlobalFoundries’ 22FDX process and the nRF54L on TSMC’s 22ULL process — Nordic designs its chips and outside foundries manufacture them, the fabless model.

It then moved beyond short-range radio. In January 2018, English Wikipedia says, Nordic introduced its first cellular product, the nRF91 series, with the nRF9160 system-in-package for LTE-M and NB-IoT, the low-power mobile-network standards used by connected meters and trackers; Norwegian Wikipedia dates the nRF9160 launch to 12 December 2018. In 2022 it unveiled the nRF70 series, a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 companion chip, and it also makes power-management chips under the nPM name. Its software, the nRF Connect SDK, is built on the open-source Zephyr real-time operating system, and nRF Cloud is its own service platform for connected devices. English Wikipedia lists wireless headphones, keyboards and mice, sports equipment, asset trackers, meters and smart-home devices among the products that use its chips.

Design and documentation.

A fabless chip designer has an unusual problem for a brand: its product is a small, dark square that most buyers never see. The company designs the chip, an outside foundry makes the wafers, and the finished part disappears inside someone else’s phone, television, router or car. The visual language of the category grows out of that gap between what the company makes and what anyone can look at.

One answer is the rendering. Chips appear floating above circuit-board landscapes, lit from below, with traces running off toward the horizon like roads seen from the air. Another is the die photograph: a close view of the silicon itself, often tinted in false colour so that memory blocks, processor cores and interfaces read as separate districts on a map.

A third answer is to show the products the chip ends up in. Reference designs — earbuds, security cameras, smart speakers, displays, small smart-home gadgets — let a designer point to a finished object without claiming it as its own. Developer kits and evaluation boards, photographed on desks next to laptops and cables, speak to the engineers who choose components.

The calendar matters too. Much of the category’s public presentation happens at trade shows such as CES in Las Vegas, Computex in Taipei, Embedded World in Nuremberg and the Hot Chips conference, where booths, demo walls and technical papers carry the brand. Many press releases follow the same rhythm, dated from headquarters and timed to a show. The guides that follow look at how individual companies work within these conventions, and at what can be documented about each one.

From hardware supplier to platform.

For two decades the company had one chief executive. Evertiq reported on 12 December 2023 that Svenn-Tore Larsen, who joined Nordic’s board in 2000 and became chief executive in 2002, would step down at the end of 2023, and that the board had appointed Vegard Wollan to take over on 1 January 2024 after an international search, part of a succession programme begun in 2021. Wollan had started his career at Nordic VLSI and, Evertiq said, was one of the team of inventors behind the AVR microcontroller, which he took to Atmel in 1996; he later founded Mywo and ran TouchNetix before returning to Nordic.

Acquisitions have followed the shift from chips toward software and services. In August 2023, English Wikipedia says, Nordic agreed to buy the intellectual-property portfolio of Atlazo, a San Diego artificial-intelligence and machine-learning company. In June 2025 it announced the purchase of Memfault, its long-term partner, and completed it on 1 July 2025, Nordic’s stock-exchange notice says; Memfault’s cloud platform monitors connected devices and delivers secure over-the-air software updates. Evertiq reported on 25 June 2025 that Nordic would build Memfault’s tools into its whole product range and into nRF Cloud, and quoted Wollan calling the deal “a declaration of intent.” Evertiq described the move as Nordic stepping from hardware supplier to complete solution partner.

The company remains a Norwegian public company, Nordic Semiconductor ASA, headquartered in Trondheim and listed in Oslo. Its name ties it to a region, and its product names — nRF followed by a series number — are an engineering code rather than a consumer brand, and its chips go into products sold under other companies’ names.

For a design guide, Nordic Semiconductor shows how a component maker builds an identity around a product prefix and a home city rather than a consumer logo. Compare Arm, whose Cortex-M cores sit at the heart of the nRF chips, and Silicon Labs, another fabless designer of wireless IoT chips. For this guide we use a fjord blue, a polar navy, ice white and a sea teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Nordic Semiconductor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.