[NEW] Silicon Labs new MG26 (EFR32MG26) Zigbee/Thread/Bluetooth SoC will offer up to 3200KB Flash, 512KB RAM, and 64 GPIO’s in order to be as future-proof as possible

[Hedda]

FYI; Silicon Labs announced xG26 (EFR32xG26) MCU family that includes a new MG26/EFR32MG26 (multiprotocol) SoC which Silabs call "future-proof", and that uses same EmberZNet (Ember/EZSP) firmware /interface as other Series 2 that is compatible with Zigbee2MQTT:

https://news.silabs.com/2024-04-09-Silicon-Labs-xG26-Sets-New-Standard-in-Multiprotocol-Wireless-Device-Performance

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/efr32xg26

Silabs claim these are "future-proof" because feature up to a whopping 3200KB of Flash Storage and 512KB of RAM, as well as 64 GPIO.

It looks like there already is platform support for 'efr32xg26' in Silicon Labs Gecko SDK (GSDK) 4.4 / 4.4.x versions and later(?).

Now for Zigbee, Thread/OpenThread, and Bluetooth the interesting SoC/MCU for is Silicon Labs EFR32MG26 Series 2 (a.k.a. MG26):

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg26-series-2-socs

While there are no EFR32MG26/MGM260 based radio modules or adapers and dongles available yet I am sure that it will not take too long before we will at least see the first EFR32MG26 based radio module from companies like RF-Star/RFstar and Ebyte/ceByte.

Once they are made available I think this new EFR32MG26 SoC/MCU model will be particularly interesting as a Zigbee Coordinator targeting gateway applications that allow for a much higher total Zigbee 3.0 device limitation, (meaning there will be no problems using over 200 Zigbee 3.0 devices which have been a practical limitation on the popular EFR32MG21 with current firmware builds), while also providing enough headroom to enetually support RCP Multi-PAN running concurrent multiprotocol with multiple networks (like Zigbee and Matter over Thread Thread Boarder Router at the same time) if that feature ever becomes more stable in the future Gecko SDK versions.

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee

Other than having 5x Flash Storage and RAM + double of GPIOs, the specification looks practically identical to the previous EFR32MG24:

No news on FCC/CE precertified MGM260/MGM260P/MGM260L) modules based on EFR32MG26 to replace MGM240 and MGM240.

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg26-series-2-modules

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg24-series-2-modules

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg21-series-2-modules

PS: At the same time they also announced EFR32BG26 (Silabs EFR32 BG26) which is basically the same chip locked to Bluetooth only:

https://www.silabs.com/wireless/bluetooth/efr32bg26-series-2-socs