News Briefs (March 13, 2006)

Fifteen representatives from the China Renewable Energy Development Project (REDP) toured solar energy equipment manufacturer Spire Corp. in Bedford, Mass., on Friday as part of their study tour of the US. The aim of the tour is to increase the participants' technical knowledge of the photovoltaic business and foster an information exchange between them and their renewable energy colleagues in the US. Sponsored by the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank, REDP aims to establish sustainable markets for economical and environmentally friendly wind and photovoltaic technologies in China to increase electricity services in rural areas. . . . To better serve its customers in Europe and Asia, Imperx Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla., said it opened a software development and customer support office in Moscow and staffed it with engineers from the Russian aerospace industry. Imperx had used the Russian engineers in a consulting capacity to develop its image acquisition and analysis software. The Moscow office employs five technical staffers, including General Manager and Senior Software Developer Oleg Margorin, and plans to add an applications engineer. Imperx manufactures imaging products in four core areas -- cameras, frame grabbers, adapters and repeaters -- used in the machine vision, medical, defense, surveillance and astronomy markets. . . . Munich-based semiconductor production technology provider Suss MicroTec and light-measurement systems maker Instrument Systems announced their partnership for developing a next-generation, high-throughput test system for LED devices at the wafer level, enabling manufacturers to test up to 70,000 LED dies per hour. The companies said the partnership is designed to meet the increasing demands from LED manufacturers for LED devices that can be produced faster and for less money. A prototype of the system will be exhibited at SEMICON China from March 21-23 at the Shanghai New International Expo Center.