The Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts that Taiwan's real GDP will contract by 6.5% in 2009. The poor economic and financial environment abroad will continue to undermine Taiwan's growth prospects in 2010, when the economy is forecast to expand by just 0.6%.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir said he believes SanDisk gained market share of about 3% at the expense of rivals in the MicroSD memory card market during the second quarter.

Converge also reports that demand for DDR3 modules remains strong, with supplies limited, and that Xeons and AMD Opterons are the drivers for cost savings in the CPU space.

Exactly a year and five months after Toshiba brought an end to the high-definition disc format war, the Japanese consumer electronics company confirmed its plans to produce its own Blu-ray Disc player.

Beijing now expects China to achieve 8% growth for 2009 as a whole, which compares with a predicted contraction of between 1% and 1.5% in the US. However, the Chinese government warned that some economic challenges remain.

German computer chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said Thursday that its revenue for the most recent quarter fell 18 percent as customers placed fewer orders.

The investment in semiconductor in the second half will concentrate on introduction of 40nm DRAM and 30nm NAND, and shifting main process to 50nm and 40nm NAND.

Cisco Systems has continued trimming its workforce at its San Jose, CA, headquarters. Sources close to the company say between 600 and 700 employees (about 1% of global workforce) at the networking giant received layoff notices.

Experts at Semicon West 2009 were in broad agreement that the industry must change its business model in the face of global recession and ever-advancing R&D costs.

The world's biggest mobile phone maker saw a 66% slide in quarterly profit as the economic downturn hit demand for handsets. Rival Sony Ericsson also reported a quarterly loss and warned that the rest of the year would remain difficult for the company.

ZTE has said it had won 34% of China Mobile Communications's third-round 3G network expansion tender.

Xilinx has announced net income was US$38.0 million for the quarter ended June 27, 2009, down 56% from US$86.3 million a year ago. The specialized chipmaker also saw its net sales for the quarter slide 23% on year.

Second-quarter net income was US$47.4 million, down from US$98.0 million in the second quarter of 2008.

Citing the embodiment of its concept of "holistic lithography," ASML has unwrapped two hardware/software components to help chipmakers improve lithography process windows while avoiding costly and timely steps and maintenance downtime.

Foxconn, the contracted iPhone maker for Apple, is manufacturing a 3G version of iPhone tailored to customers in China, disclosed sources familiar with the matter on July 15.