Harting has opened its new centre of innovation in Rahden, Germany. The seventh plant in east Westphalia will go into operation with a workforce of some 120, about one and a half years after the building on the Rahden industrial estate was originally acquired.

A new material is poised to make the frequency inverters used with large electric motors more efficient and powerful. Together with several partners, researchers from Siemens Corporate Technology and experts for large electrical drives at Siemens Industry Drive Technologies are studying how the semiconductor silicon carbide can be used as a diode material in place of pure silicon.

EVS International, a company involved in solder recovery, has appointed Upton Australia as its distributor in Australia. Upton serves a national user base from its headquarters in Bayswater, Victoria, and is a supplier of PCB manufacturing, rework and repair equipment and services, serving a broad range of industries including communications, computer, industrial, motor vehicles, avionics and military.

International Rectifier has available an online insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) selection tool that enables design optimisation in a wide range of applications including motor drives, uninterruptible power supplies, solar inverters and welding.

Advantech is holding two free embedded solution days in November - one in Melbourne and the other in Sydney.

Renesas has introduced a three-pronged business strategy including (1) formulation of growth strategies by optimising business portfolios, (2) realisation of merger synergies, such as the integration of development environments, technology platforms and various infrastructures and (3) implementation of structural reforms to create a business structure with stable profitability and resistance to changing market conditions.

The University of Sydney has selected Agilent’s DSO1002A oscilloscope for its physics labs that are focused on quantum science research.

The pace of the European solar photovoltaic market in the first half of 2010 was dominated by the impending mid-year incentive tariff reductions in Germany and conditioned by the lower module pricing that emerged through 2009, according to the latest from Solarbuzz in Europe PV Markets 2010.

Amber Technology has taken over the distribution of Tannoy studio monitors in Australia. Tannoy is part of the TC Group International for which Amber is a distributor.

The Asia Pacific personal computer market is forecast to grow 20.3% in 2010, reaching 114.6 million unit shipments, according to Gartner’s latest forecast.

Avnet Express, part of Avnet, has launched a comprehensive e-commerce website in Asia. The site www.avnetexpress.com/asia is said to represent the first distributor website in Asia to offer a China payment capability.

Schneider Electric has opened an electric process control laboratory at the University of Sydney that will teach and train process engineering, dynamics and control.

Datacraft will extensively restructure the backbone network that connects 14 sites across the Indonesian islands.

Plessey Semiconductors says it has transferred its first bipolar process, the W-series process, onto its 8″ line in Plymouth, England.

Celemetrix is moving into a bigger facility and from Monday 30 August the company will be at 20 Joseph Street, Blackburn North, 3130.