Espressif's Thread Border Router has recently obtained the Thread Interoperability Certificate V1.3, which makes it a Thread-Certified Component that supports Matter application scenarios. Espressif's Thread Border Router is based on a combination of Espressif's own Wi-Fi and 802.15.4 chips, while it is supported by ESP-IDF and OpenThread.

More specifically, the solution combines any SoC from Espressif’s Wi-Fi series (i.e., ESP32, ESP32-C, or ESP32-S), as well as Espressif’s IEEE 802.15.4 SoC, ESP32-H2. Additionally, the ESP Thread Border Router SDK is built on top of Espressif’s own IoT Development Framework, ESP-IDF, and the open-source OpenThread protocol stack, thus providing support for all network features required for constructing a Thread border router. The above-mentioned SDK also provides a rich product-level functionality which enables customers to achieve faster productization.

Not only does the Espressif Thread Border Router support the protocol functions of the 1.3 Thread standard, e.g., bidirectional IPv6 connectivity, Service Discovery Delegate, Service Registration Server, Multicast Forwarding, NAT64, etc., but it also supports product-level features, such as Web GUI for device configuration, automatic RCP upgrade, RF coexistence, etc. This whole range of features significantly facilitates users in terms of bringing their products to market quickly.

As a result of achieving these milestones, the Espressif Thread Border Router development board has just been officially released. This development board integrates ESP32-S3 and ESP32-H2, which make it usable primarily for the development of Thread Border Routers, but also for Zigbee Gateway products. ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 on the development board provides 4 MB of Flash and 2 MB of PSRAM, while ESP32-H2-MINI-1 provides 2 MB of Flash. The development board can also be expanded with sub-boards which further enhance its functionality, thus adding to it an Ethernet interface, a Human-Machine Interface (HMI), and voice control.

ESP Thread Border Router/Zigbee Gateway Development Board

If you are interested in learning more about Espressif’s Thread Border Router solution, please refer to the relevant blog posts: 1) Matter: Thread Border Router in Matter and 2) Espressif Thread Border Router. You can also contact our customer support team, who will try and assist you as soon as possible.