LED lamps were compared to other technologies in a recent issue of National Geographic magazine, and LED lighting was also discussed by the UK parliament last week.

Flat-screen maker LG Display expects a more than 50 percent rise in shipments of LCD TV panels in China in 2009, Gyo-Young Song, sales chief in charge of south China, said on Wednesday.

Samsung Electronics may shed jobs through a voluntary retirement program as the consumer electronics giant faces a sharp drop in profits amid a global economic slowdown.

Seiko Epson will consolidate production at its unprofitable liquid-crystal-display and semiconductor units as part of a plan to focus on faster growing businesses including printers and projectors

The NAND rally continues. Vendors continue to increase their component prices, while SanDisk separately raised its flash card tags, according to an analyst. Amid component shortages--and reported "quality issues" at the Intel-Micron joint venture--NAND prices could jump again in 2Q.

Mario Morales, an analyst with market researcher IDC, is in the unenviable position of following one of the most bedraggled sectors in technology right now: semiconductors. "The biggest question I am getting is, when is the bottom?" Morales said last week. He doesn't see any growth coming to the semiconductor business until at least mid-2010.

With revenues falling by as much as 50% in some electronics sectors and with entire markets undergoing fundamental changes, the old ways of doing business are not enough to thwart this downturn.

The economic slump has become so pronounced that even outsourcing is getting scaled back. Executives who once relied on outside firms to handle certain IT tasks to cut costs are now reining in some outsourcing plans on concern they're too expensive.

Faced with a steep decline in sales, chipmaker National Semiconductor said Wednesday it will eliminate more than one-quarter of its work force, or 1,725 jobs.

China exports dropped an "ugly" 25.7% in February after January's 17.5% fall. The government is trying to boost domestic spending to alleviate the pain

Sun Microsystem has laid out more of its plans for using solid-state drives in its servers, which it says will help customers to reduce energy costs and improve application performance in the data center.

A South Korean trade commission has taken what could be a first step toward regulating wireless chip vendor Qualcomm's business practices in the country.

Much to the chagrin of the largest high-tech companies whose products have served as the foundation for computing for the past 30 years, the microprocessor is breaking free of the chains that bind it. ARM is a microprocessor manufacturer that is taking advantage of advancing technology's steady destruction of those chains forged by the likes of AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.