SYDNEY, May 28 -- Redfern Photonics Pty. Ltd., an Australian company that invests in and helps develop photonics communications firms, has been named a key sponsor of the National Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Australia, which operates the ICT Centre of Excellence, a government initiative that aims to raise $540 million in the next 5 years in ICT research and commercialization. Since early 2000, Redfern Photonics said it has attracted more than $396 million from international investors and the Australian venture capital market. The Redfern Group's spinoff and investee companies market a variety of vertically integrated products in the high-speed, high-bandwidth networking and communications industry. These include application-specific optical fiber, passive and active photonic components for the dense-wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) market, integrated optical devices (planar lightwave circuits), polymer microstructured optical fiber and terabit networking platforms for metropolitan area networks.