Daily News Briefs

Infinova, a Monmouth, N.J., manufacturer of products for video surveillance, access control systems and fiber optic communications, has hired Ray Bustamante as regional sales manager for California, Arizona and Nevada. Bustamante, who has more than 15 years experience in the security and surveillance industry, will be part of the team leading Infinova's participation in the security, traffic surveillance and fiber optics markets. . . . Semiconductor equipment industry veteran Ken Levy, chairman of KLA-Tencor Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based supplier of semiconductor wafer inspection products, received Needham & Company's first Legends of the Industry award at Needham's Semicon West technology dinner, held last night in San Francisco. Levy founded KLA Instruments Corp. in 1976 and oversaw the company's entry into the semiconductor manufacturing instrumentation field and its development of technologies in areas such as reticle inspection, wafer defect inspection, wafer metrology and yield management software. In 1997, KLA Instruments merged with Tencor Instruments and became KLA-Tencor Corp. . . . Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. (CNI), a Houston-based carbon nanotechnology outfit, announced today it has been granted a US patent for coated single-wall carbon nanotubes and ropes of single-wall carbon nanotubes. The technology is part of intellectual property developed by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Smalley and licensed exclusively to CNI by Rice University in 2001. A variety of materials are attracted to single-wall carbon nanotubes and form nanometer-scale coatings on the surface of the nanotubes. Such non-covalent interactions provide an important tool to assist in the ultimate dispersion of carbon nanotubes into solvents, polymers and other media.