Motorola Ventures invests in networking company

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Motorola Ventures, the equity investment arm of Motorola Inc., has made an equity investment in Intellon Corp., a supplier of HomePlug-compatible IC's for home networking, networked entertainment and connected powerline applications.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Intellon (Ocala, Fla.) currently offers its customers two silicon solutions for HomePlug-based networking. One, HomePlug 1.0, is in use on six continents. It was recently enhanced with a Turbo chipset that offers additional performance gains to meet the demands of emerging content distribution applications such as IPTV, whole- house audio and VoIP traffic management.

Later this year, Intellon will introduce the HomePlug AV 200Mbps chipset, the INT6000. This technology has an architecture designed to meet the needs of high-definition content distribution.

Intellon is also involved in efforts to bring a Broadband over Powerline standard to market in conjunction with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, an industry initiative to create specifications for in-home powerline networking.

"Motorola remains committed to developing and delivering next generation technologies like Broadband over PowerLine (BPL) for its customers," said Matthew I. Growney, managing director of Motorola Ventures, in a statement. "Intellon's HomePlug chip portfolio will provide Motorola with many different connectivity solutions for within the home and to the home applications."