International Rectifier and Sanyo Semiconductor have announced that they are forming a joint venture to design, develop and market electronic motor drive power modules for energy-efficient appliances and light industrial applications.

In a different approach to creating white light, several researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories have developed what is claimed to be the first solid-state white light-emitting device using quantum dots. In the future, the use of quantum dots as light-emitting phosphors may represent a major application of nanotechnology.

South Australian-based valve and pipe fittings specialist Philmac has appointed David Stretton as National Distribution and Logistics Manager and to the company's executive board. Mr Stretton will be responsible for national distribution inventory, purchasing and supply chain management of all finished goods.

The first International Conference on Computational Methods in Fluid Power Technology, will be held in Melbourne, from November 26-28.

In the first piece of research into how genetically modified (GM) herbicide-tolerant crops could be used to benefit the environment, scientists have shown that creative use of GM crops could bring back increasing numbers of endangered wildlife and birds such as skylarks and finches in the UK.

AEEMA, Australian Technology Park Precinct Management and ATP Innovations are to 'kick start' an industry cluster linked to the Australian Technology Park (ATP).

Light transports data at high speed over fibre-optic networks. Light measures and creates images of large and small objects in scanners and microscopes. Light writes information onto all sorts of recording media and surfaces. The best-quality light is produced by lasers. Although there are many materials capable of generating beams of laser light, few of them operate at the shorter wavelengths.

A CD-ROM of proceedings from the Technology Futures 2003 conference is available for purchase.

A new class of microscopic crystal structures developed at the University of Toronto is bringing high bandwidth optical microchips one step closer to efficient, large-scale fabrication. The structures, known as photonic band gap (PBG) materials, could usher in an era of speedy computer and telecommunications networks that use light instead of electrons.

Intel has announced details of its 'tri-gate' transistor design, stating that the tri-gate transistor is moving from research to the development phase.

The three-in-one event of Austronics, Automate & Electrix 2003 opens from 2-4 September at the Sydney Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour. It is set to attract in excess of 8000 visitors from the electronic, manufacturing , process and electrical industries. It will highlight the latest innovations in Australian and international technology.

Magnets form the basis of computer technology, so the speed at which magnets can act and react has become extremely important. The Nanomagnetics and Spin Dynamics (NSD) group in the School of Physics recently hosted Dr Tom Silva, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Colorado, to work with them on a development of a high speed magnetometer which measures magnetisation at very short time scales.

The ability to make atomic-level changes in the functional components of semiconductor switches, demonstrated by a team of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, North Carolina State University and University of Tennessee physicists, could lead to changes in the semiconductor industry.

In 1978, a 'hand held' was a transistor radio, computers were gigantic mainframe, immobile machines, and the Internet was a project by a handful of research scientists. Twenty-five years later, Intel Corporation is marking its 25th year of delivering silicon products based on Intel architecture, and data from industry analyst firm Mercury Research indicates that the company has now shipped more than 1 billion x86 CPUs since that time, sparking a new era of computing and communication solutions.

Sun Microsystems and Intel Corporation have announced a collaboration that will enable Java technology-enabled audio, visual and multimedia applications to users of mobile devices using Intel XScale technology based processors.