Eli Harari, founder, chairman and chief executive of SanDisk, made the predications during a keynote. He also warned that the NAND industry is at the "crossroads," as there is a "disconnect" between future capacity requirements and demand.

Advanced Inquiry Systems, a developer of wafer-level sensing systems for memory testing, has closed an US$11 million Series B financing round with all its current investors participating.

Nano Solar Technology has ordered Oerlikon Solar's 120MW end-to-end Micromorph production line for making thin film solar modules.

Countries must rebalance their economies to make it sustainable, IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard commented. Economies dominated by consumption - such as the US - would have to focus more on exports, while Asia turned more to imports.

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.