South Korean exports in September 2009 will probably post their best performance in almost a year and confidence among its exporters has surged to the strongest in almost six years.

DRAM sales will probably climb 21% to US$22.4 billion in 2010, the first gain in four years, a Seoul-based analyst at Morgan Stanley wrote in a report.

In addition to a DRAM recovery, the NOR and NAND flash memory market has been extremely active. The volume of requests for Spansion and Numonyx flash memory has tripled over the last two months.

The SSD market has been one of several factors that have boosted demand for NAND flash memory and, as a result, boosted NAND flash prices, too. While this trend will likely continue to benefit Micron and SanDisk, it is equally likely to work against STEC in the longer term.

The IBM eDRAM in 32nm SOI technology is the fastest embedded memory announced to date, achieving latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds.

Singapore and Thailand have reported steady improvement in August export figures as signs of a gradual global recovery began to emerge.

The serial-ATA (SATA) SSDs, from Samsung Electronics, are aimed at supporting virtualized environments and I/O intensive applications.

Rambus and Kingston Technology have jointly announced a collaborative development of a threaded module prototype using DDR3 DRAM technology.

"The worst is behind us. The upward trend has stabilized, so we now anticipate second-half sales growth of about 40% compared to the first half of 2009," said the analog/mixed-signal foundry.

Russia's government is in talks with Germany on buying a stake in Infineon Technologies, said AFK Sistema, tycoon Vladimir Yevtushenkov's holding company.

Arrow Electronics has entered into a new distribution agreement with AU Optronics (AUO) for the company’s flat-panel displays used in the medical device, aerospace and defense, kiosk and digital display industries. Arrow will provide AUO with distribution services, and offer value-added integration with AUO technology to Arrow customers.

Buyers can expect price erosion for NOR flash memory for the rest of the year, but prices will stabilize in 2010, according to market researcher IC Insights.

"We believe this delay in fab closures is due to stronger than expected demand, and Fairchild wanting to continue manufacturing product at those facilities to meet this stronger than expected demand...

Yukio Hatoyama on September 16 took office as prime minister and named a cabinet, promising to bring change to the country mired in stagnation after a half-century of virtually uninterrupted, one-party rule.

Samsung, which saw its operating profits jump five-fold to 2.5 trillion won in the second quarter, is expected to report 3.8 trillion won in the third, analysts said. The growth can be attributable to increases in chip and panel prices.