Vishay Intertechnology has won an award from the French association SPDEI, which includes over 40 distributors of electronic componentry.

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have theorised a means of shrinking electronics so they could be run using light instead of electricity.

C&D Technologies says that Atmel has joined the Z-One Digital Power Alliance.

B&R and Hager this year celebrate their 50th anniversaries. They were independently founded in 1955, on opposite sides of the world. In Australia, both companies came together 11 years ago to form the joint venture company Hager B&R.

Yokogawa Australia has opened a standalone sales and service facility in Adelaide to support and strengthen business development activities in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

Intel and Research In Motion are collaborating on BlackBerry devices. RIM is adopting the XScale architecture and will use the PXA9xx cellular processor, codenamed 'Hermon', for its next-generation BlackBerry devices that will run on high-speed EDGE (enhanced data rates for global evolution) networks.

ADC Krone Australia has won a three-year contract to assist in supplying Telstra's Customer Access and Inter Exchange Network.

Farnell InOne, international distributor of electronic and industrial components, issued a warning at the launch of its new catalogue of RoHS-compliant products, alerting the electronics industry to possible mayhem if distributors don't take the lead in issuing new part numbers for compliant stock.

NewTek Instruments has been appointed Australian distributors of Corning Cable Systems' Landscape solutions optical test equipment products.

Acqiris has appointed Trio Test and Measurement Solutions to resell its products. Under the non-exclusive agreement Trio will distribute the Swiss-based Acqiris' products, throughout Australia from its sales offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

A high-capacity chip under development is claimed to have the potential to do away with many of the identity documents, credit cards and passwords people have to use each day. The IST program-funded project SM-PAYSOC has created a working prototype of the chip packaged in a smartcard, which in the future could also be incorporated into a USB token or a SIM card.

NEC has entrusted ARM technology experts BlueWater Systems with the development of a modern replacement for the ageing and bulky third-party magnetic tape units (MTUs) used within its NEAX telephone exchanges.

Soanar and Infineon Technologies have mutually agreed to end their distribution agreement in Australia and New Zealand at the end of December. After two years working together both companies have decided to pursue other interests.

A team of University of California scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed what it claims is the first inorganic, multi-colour light-emitting diodes based on colloidal quantum dots encapsulated in a gallium nitride semiconductor.

A Victorian government funded electronics industry capability mission to North Asia last year has generated almost $60 million in actual and anticipated sales over three years, according to the government.