Silicon Labs MG26 development kits, EFR32MG26 SoCs and MGM260P radio modules are now finally available

[Hedda]

FYI, Silabs first announced the new Silicon Labs xG26 family in April of 2024 but now it SoCs and radio modules are finally available:

https://news.silabs.com/2025-02-26-Silicon-Labs-Redefines-Smart-Home-Connectivity-with-New-Concurrent-Multiprotocol-SoC

EFR32MG26 SoC replaces EFR32MG24 and EFR32MG21 SoCs, while the MGM260(P) modules replaces MGM240(P) and MGM210(P).

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

While there are no EFR32MG26 or MGM260 based radio modules or adapters and dongles available yet I hope 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.

There are at least now several new Silicon Labs MG26 development kits, all relying on the Simplicity Studio Version 5 IDE.

xG26-PK6028A “EFR32xG26 Wireless 2.4 GHz +10 dBm Pro Kit” combines the BRD4002A Wireless Pro Kit mainboard with the BRD4120A EFR32xG6 Wireless 2.4 GHz +10 dBm QFN68 radio board.

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/efr32xg26-pro-kit-10-dbm?tab=overview

xG26-DK2608A “EFR32xG26 Dev Kit” is a more compact, yet feature-packed development platform with several sensors.

https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/efr32xg26-dev-kit?tab=overview

For reference; Silicon Labs announced xG26 (EFR32xG26) MCU family that includes a new MG26/EFR32MG26 (multiprotocol) SoC calling it "future-proof" hardware.

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

It uses the same EmberZNet (Ember/EZSP) interface as other Series 2 so should that is compatible from Silicon Labs Gecko SDK (GSDK) 4.4 / 4.4.x versions and later,

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.

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

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 evetually 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, though it does integrates a Matrix Vector Processor (MVP) for AI/ML hardware acceleration and Math functions:

Anyway, MG26 does target Home Automation so think it is very relevant