The last five decades have seen an explosion of interest in exploring the possibilities of new materials for industrial and commercial applications. Materials Technology is now recognized as being one of the most important factors driving the development and growth of a nation’s economy. The sciences of design, processing, manufacturing and materials utilization are crucial elements contributing to the growth of new industries. The need for new discoveries in Materials Science has encouraged scientists from around the world to meet regularly and to discuss the latest advances and innovations.

This book contains more than 200 papers; all dealing with recent research findings related to engineering ceramics and associated materials. Particular emphasis is placed on the consideration of novel technical challenges and innovative technologies in advanced engineering ceramics: including new classes of high-temperature structural ceramics, nanomaterials/nanocomposites, environmental- and energy-related ceramics and so on, which are expected to open up new frontiers for engineering ceramics in the 21st century.

The Industrial Revolution showed that the development and improvement of new materials and functions could bring about social change, and benefit human society. However, one can be forgiven for feeling that more recent materials research, particularly in the domain of metals, has focused only upon individual elemental characteristics and narrow specialty fields, and that the original vision of materials research has thus been lost.

This is a time of newly emerging research topics in manufacturing technologies such as MEMS/Nano-Technology, Photo-Electric Devices, Precision Mechanical, Semiconductor and Optico-Mechatronic Manufacturing Technologies as well as Advanced Manufacturing and Automation Technology. The objective of this book is to provide a timely opportunity for the manufacturing community to present its newest research results, exchange ideas and become familiar with new trends and directions in the above manufacturing fields.

Japan is currently the most active country involved in carrying out research in. the rapidly expanding field of Electroceramics ; a field that has tremendous implications for a wide range of high-tech applications.

This eighth volume in the series covering the latest results in the field includes abstracts of papers which appeared between the publication of Annual Retrospective VII (Volumes 230-232) and the end of 2005 (allowing for vagaries of journal availability).

This proceedings volume contains 126 contributions from the 11th international meeting on Gettering and Defect Engineering in Semiconductor Technology GADEST 2005 held at “La Badine” at the Giens peninsula south of France.

The requirements of high precision and of high-quality components and devices in meeting the needs of modern industry and society in disciplines such as semiconductors, optics, nanotechnology, MEMS, manufacturing, biomedical and environmental engineering, make measurement technology and intelligent instruments (which sense, measure and report), more important than ever, and essential for the rapid development of information technology.

Materials science which focuses on clarifying a material’s properties at the micro- and nano-scale is rapidly accelerating the production of new advanced materials. The production of such materials, developed in this new century, will promote the growth of wholly new industries in a variety of engineering fields.

This collection of abstracts of experimental and theoretical papers on the subject of diffusion in silicon is intended to complement earlier volumes (DDF153-155) which covered the previous decade’s work on the same topic.