AUSTIN, Texas — Motorola intends to make a big splash in the marketplace with its PowerPC-based architecture, code-named Blackbird, which will be rolled out with a new name as a formal product at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show. The show starts Jan. 7 in Las Vegas. Blackbird is a multifunction system, providing home users with a single box that can work as a game system, network computer, home broadband router and set-top box.

Manufacturing specialist Solectron Corp. announced that it will build Blackbird systems, first for customers seeking reference designs. Commercial production is expected to begin in the first quarter of next year, and Motorola is holding discussions with some of the largest cable providers and telcos. Solectron has the ability to customize Blackbird for consumer-electronics companies and content aggregators that will use the hardware as part of their own assaults on the still-undefined digital entertainment experience, said Ray Burgess, general manager of the imaging and entertainment solutions (IES) group.

Much of Blackbird's "middleware" software was developed with partners. Spyglass Inc. built a browser and other networking software that will allow companies to customize their own offerings and get to the retail channel by next year.

Another key partner is VM Labs, a Silicon Valley-based game company headed up by former Atari Corp. president Richard Miller. VM Labs worked with Motorola to create a media processor, Nuon, which at different times has gone under the code names of Merlin and Project X, Burgess said. Nuon is a 128-bit VLIW engine that will work in tandem with the central processing unit in Blackbird, a PowerPC 860 core.

VM Labs, which Burgess said has some of the world's best game-writing talent under its roof, is committed to developing Blackbird-based games that are played competitively over the Internet. The Blackbird silicon, including the Nuon media processor, will allow images to be "entirely modeled and drawn in real-time, rather than using pre-drawn images," which require impractical amounts of bandwidth, he said.

Burgess said he envisions consumer-electronics companies customizing the Blackbird reference design and providing it to content aggregators. Those companies would provide customers with Blackbird-based systems and middleware, deriving part of their revenues from the movies, games, and other services that would run on the Blackbird hardware.

"Many of the largest consumer-electronics companies, such as Philips, have used hardware developed outside. Buying something like Blackbird is not anathema to them," Burgess said, noting that both Thomson Multimedia and Toshiba Corp. issued endorsements of the Blackbird concept at the international broadcaster's conference (IBC) in Stuttgart.

Blackbird is not the only game in town at the IES group. Motorola and Kodak shortly will announce that they are ready to provide a solid-state image-capture system, which includes a CMOS image sensor aimed at the emerging digital video camera marketplace rather than digital still cameras. The device has on-chip circuitry that compresses the image before output over a wired or wireless channel.

With digital video, many times only a few pixels change from frame to frame, and the system only needs to process and compress those few pixels. That allows really significant amounts of compression," Burgess said.

The Motorola-Kodak device initially will not be marketed to digital still camera vendors, he said, because in the 1- to 2-megapixel camera market, the manufacturers of CCDs (charge-coupled devices) can maintain a price advantage, he said.

Motorola has worked closely with Sarnoff labs in the digital television arena. Last week in Japan, Sarnoff announced that it has completed a DTV reference design, based on silicon from Motorola. A decompression device with 3.8 million transistors has taped out and goes into production in December, while a much larger baseband processing chip will be ready in the first quarter of 1999, Davis said.

Those chips will be formally unveiled, with more details about specifications and pricing, prior to the CES show.