I was wondering if there was a alternative to the popular ESP modules (not including the RTL8710) which is made by some western company, and has a proper ide and documentation?
Are you kidding? For a while, every silicon vendor in existence was either offering a wireless module, or buying up fabless IP companies that had wireless modules.I think TI was one of the earlier cases, with their CC3000 modules (now NRND), somewhat as a result of their ChipCom acquisition (although IIRC, CC didn't have WLAN at the time the were acquired.)Atmel bought Newport Media, Ozmo, and Meshnetics.
Microchip bought Roving Networks and ZeroG.SiLabs bought Ember.
Cypress bought Broadcom's IoT division.
WizNet and Lantronix have modules.
If you want to nearly any trade show, there would be a bunch of vendors you'd never heard of selling "easy to use modules for wireless connectivity." (there probably still are. IoT, you know.)
At the time that 8266 was becoming popular, most of the competing modules sold for 5x the price in large quantities ($20-$30 if you bought one at a time), were leaving the Antenna and FCC issues to the OEM, and didn't offer any user programmability (in fear of providing access to their propritietary code.) People were faced with "Things" that they wanted to add networking to, where the wireless module cost several times the entire reset of the system, and had an inaccessible CPU that was "many" times more powerful that the "Thing." Prices have come down (now ~$10); I'm not sure if the IP issues have been "solved."
I would rather like to hear about a WiFi chip, that does NOT have any internal user programmable CPU, that could be interfaced to a higher level MCU/MPU system through a common high speed interface, such as QSPI, SDIO or similar.
Good god, why? TI is probably one of the big vendors with chip-level solutions, I think. But... how much networking stack do you want to be in there? And do you trust a silicon vendor to provide and maintain a complete IP stack? What about IPv6? What about next week's deprecated security/encryption protocol?