Kuriko Miyake

Sharp Corp. and its partner Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co. Ltd. unveiled Tuesday what the companies claim to be a world-first prototype of an LCD with an 8-bit CPU on its glass substrate.

Sony Corp. unveiled two new versions of its Clie PDA (personal digital assistant) running Palm OS 5 on Wednesday.

Japan

Toshiba Corp. started shipping samples of 1Gb NAND-type flash memory chips on Monday. The chips were jointly developed with SanDisk Corp., Toshiba announced.

Japan's Sony Corp. and the Netherlands' Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV will jointly develop a new short-range radio-frequency communication technology, the two companies announced Thursday.

A Hitachi Ltd. subsidiary and IBM Corp.

The Edy electronic money system of BitWallet Inc., a 25-member consortium headed by Sony Corp. and NTT DoCoMo Inc., will be adopted by seven of Japan's major banks and credit card companies for use with their credit cards, BitWallet said Monday.

Sanyo Electric Corp. plans to start mass production of blue lasers for data replay devices such as DVD players, in April 2003, the company said Friday.