Silicon Labs MG26 (EFR32MG26) SoC/MCU based adapters will offers up to 3200KB Flash and 512KB RAM in order to be as future-proof as possible

[Hedda]

FYI; Silicon Labs have now announced xG26 (EFR32xG26) family which includes multiprotocol MG26 SoC/MCU that Silabs call "future-proof":

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

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