Orion seems to be a classic SHDSL chipset. It was apparently developed by Globespan, which then became GlobespanVirata, which then became Conexant. (Interestingly enough, the acquired GlobespanVirata products are currently with Conexant, whereas Conexant's own original telecom product lines are now Mindspeed.)
We don't have a lot of information about this chipset for two reasons:
Our company's contact with Conexant regarding this chipset took place in late 2005 when we had first reopened our SDSL quest after a long hiatus. That was when we knew barely anything about SDSL and its flavors, we were looking for information about the 8970 and 8973 bitpumps, and we didn't know yet that these chips had changed their ownership from Conexant to Mindspeed. We were looking for information about these chips on Conexant's website, didn't find them, found Orion instead, and decided to give it a try since it was claimed to support both SHDSL and legacy SDSL/2B1Q.
Conexant required us to go through an NDA process before they would give us Orion datasheets, and while waiting for that to go through I was looking for them on the web through various part miner and datasheet archive sites. One of those sites did have a datasheet for Orion from the GlobespanVirata days (dated June 25, 2002), and I was finally able to get a basic technical overview of the beast.
The Orion chipset consists of two chips: a digital IC containing a DSP and a framer, and an analog front end — much like M289xx. However, whereas M289xx supports SHDSL and SDSL/2B1Q with the same hardware, just different firmware images loaded at run time, Orion supported SHDSL/HDSL2, SDSL/2B1Q and SDSL/CAP via population options according to the 2002 datasheet. According to this datasheet, the digital IC had to be GS2237 for SHDSL and HDSL2, GS2216 for SDSL/2B1Q and GS2214 for SDSL/CAP.
This information was interesting, but the Orion datasheet from
DatasheetArchive.com was far
too brief to build an STU from it, so we still went through the NDA process
hoping that the official
datasheets we would get from Conexant would
be better.
However, when we got those official datasheets, they turned out to be just as superficial. Both the 2002 and the 2005 datasheets mention a Design Package which seems to contain the stuff one would need to build an STU, but when I asked the Conexant contact woman about it, she said that the Design Package cost money. However, I didn't get any further into that subject because I had noticed something else: the GS2214 and GS2216 chips for legacy SDSL were gone from the 2005 datasheet and only GS2237 was left. A quick call to Conexant's part distributor confirmed that GS2214 and GS2216 were discontinued.
I don't know whether they had managed to implement SDSL/2B1Q in addition to SHDSL in the GS2237 as a software option like M289xx or if Orion has effectively become a SHDSL-only chipset — at that point my interest in this chipset had ended.
Our Orion datasheets are on our FTP site.