World class brainpower is throbbing to spectacular effect once more at Bletchley Park. This time it is cutting edge high technology pumping out of the intelligence hothouse where once our finest code-crackers broke German plans for European domination.
    Ceravision Ltd, a manufacturing industry innovator, has become the first tenant of a new business and science centre at the former WW2 code breaking centre near Milton Keynes.
    In the new initiative, tenant companies will be bidding to cash in on the international peace dividend - and Ceravision is well placed to blaze the trail.
    Regarded as one of the UK's most high potential small manufacturing start-ups, the company has attracted around £1m in venture funding over the past 12 months.
    Its potentially world-beating plasma lamp technology involved a clever mix of ceramic science, innovative engineering and packaging technologies, and new electronic driver techniques.
    The result is a lamp that produces exceptionally high light output and 'columnated' or very focused white light - at much lower cost than current high pressure metal halide sources.
    Future applications for the lamp are extremely broad, says Ceravision's Head of Intellectual Property Charles Guthrie. "It could be used in anything from rear projection televisions, street lighting, medical equipment, industrial applications to the very lighting in your home or car," he said. "Furthermore, the light emitted has no ultra violet and little infrared making it ideal for plant growth."
    Cost is an important factor as some projection lamps last a maximum of 2,000 hours and cost $500 to replace. Ceravision's engineers believe that its plasma lamps could reach a projected life of well over 10,000 hours at a fraction of the current industry cost.
    The intellectual property of the technology has been strongly protected with a series of patent families covering the lamp, its constituent parts and its manufacturing techniques.
    Multinational companies in the US, Europe and Japan have expressed a keen interest in the lamps and Ceravision anticipates first product sales or joint manufacturing license agreements in the second quarter of 2005.

    Tim Reynolds, Ceravision's Managing Director, said the company had just received an important endorsement of its technology when NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, agreed to invest £150,000 in the company.
    DTI Minister Lord Sainsbury officially opened the new business and science centre, in which 42,000 sq ft of former wartime accommodation is being refurbished to create offices and manufacturing workshops for a new generation of hi-tech companies.
    Around 300 new jobs locally will be created by the venture.
    The centre has been created through a joint venture between the Bletchley Park Trust, which has fought to maintain and preserve the historic site for the past 15 years, and the local property and finance group Milton Keynes Capital Partners.
    Sir Christopher Chataway, the famed Olympic athlete and chairman of the Trust's board, said: "This Science and Innovation Centre puts the heart back into Bletchley Park."
    At its wartime peak, more than 10,000 personnel laboured to decode Germany's most secret codes. Work by teams of cryptographers, linguists, radio operators, engineers and chess grandmasters, including Alan Turing, the brilliant Cambridge mathematician and electronics pioneer Tommy Flowers, culminated in the building of Colossus, the world's first semi-programmable electronic computer.
    The breakthroughs in decoding techniques and in electronic computing are acknowledged to have shortened the war by at least two years.
    Kept secret during much of the Cold War that followed, it is only in the last 20 years that its legacy has become more widely known.

    By Tony Quested