Scientific-Atlanta and partners Pioneer Electronics and Toshiba have won the order for up to $1 billion worth of digital TV set-top boxes from Time Warner Cable.

They beat out most of the other set-top-box contenders, including General Instrument, Hewlett-Packard, and Zenith.

The victory also puts the Sun Microsystems-designed MicroSparc chip into the set-top-box market in a major way. Scientific-Atlanta has designed its new digital set-top around the Sparc chip. The company provided a prototype digital set-top box for a Time Warner test in Orlando, Fla., but that used a MIPS Technology processor.

Time Warner will divide its set-top-box purchases among the three suppliers. The win gives Scientific-Atlanta a strong position in the emerging digital set- top market, and also allows Toshiba and Pioneer to jump into the U.S. market for the first time.

Toshiba was not a surprising choice for Time Warner, since the Japanese company has a minority equity share in the U.S. cable enterprise. Sources believe that the financial link was a major factor in Scientific-Atlanta's enlistment of Toshiba as a partner in the digital set-top-box competition.

In other activity, Scientific-Atlanta last week unveiled a low-cost cable modem for connecting PCs to cable TV networks. Called DataXcellerator, the unit will be priced initially at $259, and as low as $199 in volume. Scientific- Atlanta will team with a major competitor, Hewlett-Packard, which will provide the cable head-end network management system for data traffic. Sun Microsystems servers will be used in the head-end node.