Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments and Panasonic form an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring.
They will market and test a standard to use extent electricity, phone and coaxial cable lines to wire together computers, TVs and entertainment systems. They hope the first products using the new standard will be on the market in about a year.
"Powerline is the most ubiquitous technology in the world. You have powerlines to almost every house in the world," says Intel's Matt Theall, president of the new HomeGrid Forum.
The members of the HomeGrid Forum will work with the International Telecommunications Union to promote, test and contribute to a standard the ITU is already working on, called ITU-T G.hn. Their role will be similar to the Wi-Fi Alliance, who helped promote an IEEE wireless standard and certified thousands of products for WLANs.
The HomeGrid Forum has seven other founding members: Aware, DS2, Pulse Link, Ikanos, Sigma Designs, Westell and Gigle Semiconductor.