Daily News Briefs

Peter Pfluger has been named CEO of microelectromechanical systems developer TRONIC'S Microsystems, based in Grenoble, France. Pfluger was previously CEO of the Phonak Group and of CSEM SA, both in Switzerland. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at IBM Research Laboratories in San Jose, Calif. TRONIC’S Microsystems founding CEO, Stephane Renard, will serve as executive chairman and will be in charge of sales and marketing. . . . Newport Corp. announced it has installed its new automated laser soldering system at Flextronics Photonics, a business unit of Flextronics in Oregon. Newport is the exclusive provider of all fiber optic alignment and attachment systems for Flextronics Photonics. . . . J. Peter Krusius, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, died of cancer Jan. 30 at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca. He was 58. At Cornell, he led a research group that designed and developed techniques for joining color flat-panel television and video screens to make large active matrix LCDs made up of three panels tiled together into a single, seamless piece of glass. In 1996 he helped found Rainbow Display Inc., a Cornell start-up company created to build the displays. In 1999 RDI signed a joint development agreement with Philips Flat Display Systems, a unit of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands.