OCALA, Fla. -- Intellon Corp. has unveiled a family of low-cost CEBus controller ICs that it hopes will help to overcome the home-automation industry's decade-old inability to sell consumers on the idea of "smart homes." The line is expected to do that by allowing a range of previously discrete consumer-electronics devices to be linked inexpensively in a home network.

CEBus standard, developed in the last 10 years by the Electronic Industries Association via a consortium of manufacturers, is an op en architecture that includes protocol and performance specifications for power-line, twisted-pair, coaxial cable, RF and IR media.

By offering low-cost off-the-shelf silicon solutions to PC and consumer electronics manufacturers, Intellon is hoping that it will make it much easier and less costly for a home PC, a TV, a digital satellite decoder set-top or even a simple remote controller to feature CEBus capability.

The adoption of CEBus-compliant home products has been slow because they are too expensive, it is too difficult to implement CEBus protocols in consumer appliances and there are not enough consumer devices to link, said Jim Vander Mey, CEO and founder of Intellon. By becoming the industry's pioneer chip vendor to zero in on low-cost CEBus silicon solutions, Intellon plans to break that bottleneck.

The chip family consists of the SSC P400 power-line network-interface controller, the SSC P111 power-line media interface IC and the SSC P200 simplified network interface.

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