After investing for years in its CopperGold ADSL transceiver family, Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS) has determined that it missed its market opportunity, and will instead concentrate on its PowerQuicc family of communications processors for ADSL customer-premise equipment and infrastructure markets.

Motorola plans to continue to support current customers of the CopperGold line, which is based on the company's DSP56300 chip, but said it will make no further investments or expand its road map in that area.

Perhaps as surprising as the CopperGold disclosure was SPS' move to enter the OEM spectrum by building and selling set-top boxes (STBs) based on its Streamaster chipset, the SM5000. At the Consumer Electronics Show here, SPS announced several agreements to provide the boxes to help create a market for the delivery of television and Internet service over telephone lines.

The decision to build and sell STBs is a departure from SPS' expressed intention when it first announced the Streamaster chipset in September 1998. At that time, company executives said they had no plans to enter the box-build business.

"There hasn't been much of a market in the telco space for this type of technology in the past," said Vernon Reed, manager of strategic and customer marketing at SPS' Imaging and Entertainment Solutions Division in Austin, Texas. "The problem was that the telcos typically don't maintain an engineering infrastructure and don't want to commit to developing their own products.

"We came to the conclusion that to make this technology take off, we needed to demonstrate an end-to-end capability to meet their desire to buy it off the shelf," Reed said.

SPS announced at CES that Blockbuster Inc. and Enron Broadband Services will use the Streamaster 5000 STB to provide access to Blockbuster's Entertainment-on-Demand service, which it will launch over Enron's networks in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland, Ore. A technical trial is also under way in New York.The STB would allow subscribers to access Blockbuster movies on a pay-per-view basis and provide the ability to pause, stop, rewind, and restart the movies.

Similarly, TransACT Capital Communications Pty. said it will use the Streamaster STB to begin offering broadcast television, video-on-demand, and Web access via VDSL service next month to subscribers in Canberra, Australia. And Aliant Telecom Inc. announced it will make similar services available to customers in Canada's Atlantic provinces.

Reed said SPS is in discussions with other potential customers, adding that the company will ship more than 100,000 Streamaster STBs this year with a potential for 80 million shipments during the next few years.

"There has been some discussion that if we grow large enough, we might get spun out as our own sub-element company," he said.

The SM5000 is built around a Power- Quicc MPC860 communications processor and Nuon media engine from VM Labs Inc. In addition, the chipset has 32 to 128 Mbits of SDRAM, 8 Kbits of NVRAM, and 2 to 8 Mbits of boot flash. The platform can also be configured with a flash disk, DVD, or hard drive.

The design wins come a year after Motorola acquired General Instrument Inc., although Reed said the set-top effort was already under way at SPS and is not related to the merger.

The STB is manufactured at a former GI plant in Nogales, Mexico, and by Flextronics International Ltd. in Dallas. If volumes increase significantly, SPS may move production to Flextronics' plant in Guadalajara, Mexico, or consider other CEMs. Solectron Corp. produced some early Streamaster prototypes.

Having curtailed its CopperGold transceiver efforts, SPS has been concentrating on securing sockets for its PowerQuicc communications processors in ADSL applications, and last year sold millions into the market, said Ferenc Koplyay, marketing manager for the PowerQuicc line.

The PowerQuicc MPC860 is being used primarily in infrastructure applications such as routers and central-office equipment, but the MPC850 has found a home in ADSL customer-premise equipment combined with non-Motorola transceivers, he said.

Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts Co., Tempe, Ariz., said it's not surprising that SPS has decided to cut losses related to its CopperGold family. "There was no evidence that CopperGold had any momentum in the market," Strauss said. "It was three years late, and nobody seemed to care anymore once they began shipping last year."

SPS plans to bring out new Power- Quicc derivatives during the next few months, Koplyay said. These will include an MPC850DSL device specifically targeted at the ADSL market that the company said will reduce costs for the communications processor from $20 to around $12-with a road map to move to $10 in high volume. Motorola also plans to introduce the MPC875T, which will provide increased functionality for the MPC850 line.