It has been reported that DuPont, Sarnoff and Lucent technologies will work together to develop a display technology that could lead to thin, flexible monitors that can be wrapped around curved surfaces or rolled up and put away or carried. The project is to be sponsored by the Advanced Technology Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Richardson Electronics, a global provider of engineered solutions have announced the opening of a new branch office in Beijing, China.

A new chip for mobile devices which was developed by Bell Labs team in Australia, implements multiple input/output wireless technology, called BLAST (Bell Labs Layered Space-Time). The technology is used in base station equipment and mobile devices, and is claimed to increase the capacity and coverage of wireless networks, and permit higher speed mobile data connections for notebook PCs and hand held devices.

The Austronics, Automate, Electrix awards were presented at a gala function compered by John Blackman in the Auditorium at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on Tuesday 15th October 2002. The winners are listed below.

Awards were presented to electrical, electronic and ICT organisations by the Honourable John Howard MP at the 'Australian Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association Excellence Awards 2002' held at Sydney's Australian Technology Park. There were six awards categories including excellence in smart manufacturing, commercialisation of R&D, export, product stewardship, energy efficiency and innovation.

Agere Systems and Infineon Technologies are to jointly develop high-performance chips based on the 802.11 standard. The technology resulting in next-generation wireless LAN products will provide business and residential users with flexible access to email and the Internet. It has a bandwidth that is 20 times higher than current wireless networks and will reach up to 54 Mbit/s.

Researchers from the Commerce Departments National Institute of Standards and Technology reported they have developed methods for characterising key structural features of porous films being eyed as insulators for the ultrathin metal wires that will connect millions of devices on future microprocessors and increase processor speed.

Intel are be releasing a PC microprocessor with a new capability developed with the assistance of Dean Tullsen, called hyper-threading. The processor executes instructions from multiple threads/programs at once, as if they all came from a single thread. The CPU duplicates the architectural state on each processor, while sharing one set of processor execution resources. It makes one processor appear as two to the operating system.

Scientist from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD are working on a voice analysis system and a camera with image processing. They are focussing on designing voice activated electrical appliances and electronic equipment. An example may be a video recorder that is activated by someone saying "Record the news on channel 7 this evening" or a lamp which is turned off by the voice command of "lamp out".

Zarlink Semiconductor and Agilent have announced a multi-source agreement intended to create a common standard for pluggable 4-channel parallel optic transceiver modules that offer an aggregate bandwidth of up to 10 Gb/s.

Infineon, Schreiner, Prosecure and Utsch of Germany have developed Iltag, a digital license plate that can store information on an Infineon RFID chip with antenna.

National Instruments is relocating its Australian headquarters from Melbourne to Sydney. The move is scheduled for completion by February 2003.

CSIRO is currently involved in a project to promote the 'uptake' of advanced microjoining as an integral part of efficient design and assembly.

The UA Optical Sciences Center is using a deposition machine to make organic films such as radio frequency (RF) grocery tags that require no scanning. The machine deposits thin layers 10-100 nanometres thick of organic molecules onto a plastic substrate.

Cidetec, Cegasa and Zigor are in the first stage in a project about lithium polymer energy. They have developed a lab-scale prototype of a rechargeable graphite-polypirrol battery. The area of the battery is 1, 9 x 1, 5 cm and it can provide an energy density of 125 Wh/kg.