Higher than expected sales of desktop PCs, printers, scanners and digital cameras have prompted Hewlett-Packard to increase its previous earnings estimates for the first fiscal quarter that ended January 31 2002.

Worldwide workstation shipments totalled 1.4 million in 2001, an 11% decline from 2000, according to preliminary results from Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner.

The use of digital signal processors (DSPs) in the design of customer-specific products, or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), offers a high-growth, high-margin opportunity, according to Cahners In-Stat/MDR.

Students considering tertiary courses in IT are moving towards harder edge degrees in what is a likely reaction to the international downturn in the dotcom industry, according to the Dean of Australia's largest IT faculty at Monash University.

Hewlett-Packard has announced that a shareholder meeting to vote on the company's proposed merger with Compaq will take place on 19 March 2002.

Autron and Royal Philips Electronics' subsidiary Assembléon have announced a partnership formed with the aim of growing their Asia-Pacific business.

Multimedia will be the application that will eventually bring the mass market onto home networks, according to Cahners In-Stat.

The Directors of KAZ Computer Services have announced that KAZ has agreed to acquire Aspect Computing, one of Australia's leading IT companies.

Worldwide sales of semiconductors in the fourth quarter 2001 were unchanged from the third quarter at $60 billion, ending three quarters of double digit declines.

Inphi Corporation has announced that it has demonstrated demultiplexers running at a data rate of greater than 80 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Hyper-threading is something of a mystery, and Intel are still unsure how to release it successfully to the industry.

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that silicon wafers can be easily made into tiny explosives that could be used to chemically analyse samples in the field or serve as power sources for tiny electronic sensors the size of a speck of dust.

Using light beams in place of metal wires, engineers at Johns Hopkins University, US, have devised a cost-effective method to speed up the way microchips talk to each other.

The PC market in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, showed encouraging growth from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2001, indicating that the worst may be over for the region's markets, according to IDC.

The Asia-Pacific region has eclipsed the Americas as the greatest source of revenue for Intel.