Qualcomm has announced the opening of a new, multi-million dollar R&D center in Shanghai, which will focus on advancing chipset solutions to better address China's increasing need for high quality and affordable 3G handsets with customized features and time-to-market advantages.

South Korea's won fell the most in more than a year and the nation's stocks slumped following a report by a defector group that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il ordered the military to prepare for conflict.

Corning will introduce its new Corning G-2000 green laser at the Display Week 2010 conference, held by the Society for Information Display (SID), in Seattle, Washington, May 23-28. The G-2000 green laser demonstrates the industry's highest commercially available performance in optical power, efficiency, and bandwidth, the company said. As a result, it is well suited to meet the demands of the growing market for portable microprojection devices.

Spansion CEO John Kispert also said he could not confirm a recent Nikkei report indicating Texas Instruments was in final talks to buy two plants owned by Spansion Japan, as Spansion Japan is now a separate entity from Spansion.

We all know that for the absolute best throughput of storage available to us today, it's in solid-state-drives. The problem with SSDs is cost and the limited storage capacity in comparison to the magnetic solutions. But upcoming solutions from Seagate and Toshiba may be able to come up with something in between.

Many South Koreans joke they inhabit "the Republic of Samsung." But a one-time insider at the powerful Korean conglomerate has launched a scathing attack on his former employer, saying Korean politicians and media turn a blind-eye to the company's misdeeds.

The demand for medical instrumentation - combined with new and lower-cost transducers - means that analog-circuit design and interface for this market segment a growth area with lots of innovation and interesting work.

"As a result of this successful qualification, we currently expect to ship a significant number of tools to Epistar this year. We are excited that we have been chosen to support their volume capacity ramp in 2010...," said Bill Miller, senior VP, GM of Veeco's MOCVD Operations.

Civil aviation regulators from Taiwan and China have agreed to add 28 direct passenger flights a week between Taipei's Songshan Airport and Shanghai's Hongqiao International Airport in order to meet increasing demand for cross-straits flights, according to Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration. The new flights will begin operating before June 14.

Under the terms of the royalty bearing agreement, Qualcomm has granted CK Telecom a worldwide patent license to develop, manufacture and sell WCDMA and TD-SCDMA subscriber units and modem cards/modules.

But he declined to comment directly on market rumors that Intel could buy Infineon's wireless unit, which produces chips used in mobile network technology. "We have nothing we have to sell urgently..."

US stocks have plummeted amid fears of contagion from the eurozone debt crisis and a pending vote on overhauling financial regulation.

Elpida plans to withdraw its patent lawsuits filed with the Virginia US district court while Infineon and its US subsidiary have agreed to abandon a patent infringement complaint against Elpida and other respondents filed last February with the US International Trade Commission in Washington D.C.

"Applied's stronger second quarter results were led by revenues and profitability gains in our silicon and FPD businesses," said Mike Splinter, chairman and CEO of Applied Materials. "Global demand for computing and consumer electronics is giving our customers the confidence to make significant capacity additions, fueling what we believe will be a multiyear growth cycle..."

The Commission has adopted a decision settling a cartel investigation and imposing a fine totalling about 331 million euros (US$409 million) on Samsung, Hynix, Infineon, NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Elpida and Nanya.

Defying skeptics, iPhone sales tripled in the most recent quarter