EDA vendors Mentor Graphics and Magma Design Automation have both reported quarterly revenues that exceeded Wall Street estimates and their own sales targets, but offered outlooks for the current quarter that fell short of analysts' expectations.

South Korea's economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter of 2009, fuelling hopes that Asia's fourth-largest economy is making a solid recovery from the global downturn.

This project seeks to optimize the patterning process from design to manufacturing, extend characterization tools and methods to develop new correction and compensation techniques for reducing variability. The project will also explore lithography options for manufacturing complex chips at sub-30nm nodes.

Rambus has announced that Samsung Electronics will offer a 1Gb XDR DRAM memory device, which will broaden the availability of XDR technology for gaming, computing and consumer electronics applications.

"DRAM revenues historically fall by 20% in the first quarter, but I don't think it will fall that much in 2010...," said Hynix CEO Kim Jong-Kap on the sidelines of semiconductor equipment trade show Semicon Japan.

"The group's top decision makers have reached a broad consensus that more measures would be needed to nurture future growth engines. But that doesn't necessarily mean LG will participate in an auction next month," an LG representative said. Despite such internal views, market analysts say LG could be the "right buyer" for Hynix.

The fall in cost is due to the increased lifetime, according to the independent EU Energy Institute.

Samsung Electronics plans to invest around seven trillion won (US$6.05 billion) in its semiconductor business for 2010 - five trillion won in DRAM and two trillion won in NAND flash memory and system LSI, according to industry sources.

Spansion has announced its MirrorBit flash memory is now available as a verified configuration solution for the new Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family.