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.

Agilent has announced that it is developing a new family of arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG's) for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) long-haul and metropolitan network applications.

Philips and Sony will jointly develop a new near field radio-frequency communications technology called Near Field Communications (NFC). The technology enables short-range communication networks between consumer devices incorporating an NFC interface, and is set to improve wireless access to data and services.

QinetiQ and BOC are developing a production facility to exploit the potential of nanotechnology. This involves manipulation of atoms and molecules to achieve miniaturisation of products - such as computers. It also has the potential to provide more sensitive medical instruments to achieve faster and more accurate diagnostic techniques.

Two separate technologies are being developed by Arizona researchers, in order to make circuits from layers of organic semiconducting ink.

A wafer scale foundry-based method of hermetically sealing surface sensitive devices such as MEMS and RF has been released by Ziptronix. It operates at room temperature using industry standard tools and materials and incorporating both MEMS and IC technologies.