IN BRIEF.

Northrop Grumman Corp. (Los Angeles, CA) announced that a $30 million expansion project has been approved for business unit, Litton Interconnect Technologies (Springfield, MA). The project will enhance the capabilities and output of the printed circuit board (PCB) operations of Litton. The expansion will nearly double Litton's PCB operations, which currently occupy a 225,000-sq. ft. manufacturing plant, and will create up to 400 new jobs in the next four to five years. The facility will be operational 15 months from the start of construction.

Following a redesign of the SMTA (Minneapolis, MN) Web site, www.smta.org, the Association has made accessible all articles from their most recent educational programs via the Internet. The Knowledge Base currently features fourteen of the most recent proceedings published. With nearly 1,000 technical papers, the project is a comprehensive online technical resource. Proceedings are posted within three to four months following an event, and papers are stored in PDF format. While all visitors may search the Knowledge Base, access to download full articles is reserved for SMTA members only.

Electro Scientific Industries, Inc. (ESI, Portland, OR) has established a representative office in Shanghai, China. The decision to create sales and support capability in China permits ESI to expand business opportunities and to target strategic customers. The company also plans to open a representative office in Guangzhou, China, pending appropriate government approvals. Revenues from Asia, including Japan, accounted for 62 percent, or $252 million, of the company's total sales in the first three quarters of fiscal 2001 ended March 3, 2001.

IMAPS (Washington, D.C.) is sponsoring an Advanced Technology Workshop (ATW) on optoelectronics packaging, held October 11-14, 2001, at the Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem, PA. The ATW will bring together scientists and engineers from industry, academia and government to address the technical challenges faced by all in the optoelectronic packaging arena. Sessions will address packaging challenges posed by various device types-detectors, modulators, amplifiers and MEMS-along with associated packaging processes. For more information, visit www.imaps.org.

e4eNet (Quincy, MA) has announced that SCI Systems, Inc. (Huntsville, AL) has entered into a joint development partnership for engineering collaboration services. e4eNet has assembled a group of leaders in the electronics industry to focus on streamlining engineering data review via the Internet. Through this partnership, SCI will use the e4eNet services to facilitate internal and external collaboration and round out its requirements for NPI tools. e4eNet offers Web-based engineering collaboration over the Internet among manufacturers, customers and suppliers.

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