Sony Entertainment has announced it is reducing the price of its PlayStation 3 games consoles. In Europe the price has been lowered to 299 euros, in the US to US$299 and in the UK to £249.99.

The big bounce—GDP plunged by at over 10% (annualized) in the previous two quarters—owes much to stimulus packages in Japan and around the world.

"The cost involved in shrinking features to improve performance is a limiting factor in keeping pace with Moore's Law and a concern across the semiconductor industry," said Spike Narayan, manager, Science & Technology, IBM Research. "The combination of this directed self-assembly with today's fabrication technology eventually could lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip-making process."

A Yale University team led by Professor TP Ma has proposed a DRAM that marries a ferroelectric material with a silicon transistor. While the polarization of the ferroelectric decays, the structure, refresh cycle, power consumption and speed of the FeDRAM could offer advantages over conventional DRAMs, Ma said.

Smaller, affordable sets likely will be the most popular this back-to-school season.

"On the DRAM side, there are shortages of DDR3 SDRAM due to surprising demand in the server and other markets...The price and demand picture for NAND are also improving," said Brian Shirley, VP of Micron Technology's memory group.

Although the overall semiconductor market is expected to drop by 46% in 2009, it shows signs of rapid recovery, according to The Information Network market research company.

A run of poor earnings has damped confidence in once-booming solar companies.

Converge has tracked increased demand from module manufacturers for 128x8 DDR2 chips, both in PC667 and PC800 speeds. However, there are mixed opinions on why the market has become so tight for these modules.