The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2% pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, as consumers and businesses ratcheted back spending, plunging the country deeper into recession.

Sony has announced a major reorganization and a new management team. The changes, effective April 1, 2009, will fundamentally reorganize the company's electronics and game businesses to improve profitability and strengthen competitiveness in the midst of the continued global economic crisis.

The new management of The Foundry Company, which includes former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, is expected to announce the official name of the company soon. When AMD does split in two, Meyer said he will not have any management role in the new company. However, AMD does stand to be The Foundry Company's largest customer, which will continue to tie the two companies together. Meyer also suggested that AMD might switch some of its ATI graphics chip production to The Foundry Company as well.

DRAM manufacturers may not see the financial benefits of the expected rebound in memory device prices until the second-half of 2009, but can take comfort from the latest forecast from IC Insights that prices will rise from 1Q09 onwards, calling a bottom to the precipitous declines year-on-year, due to the massive overcapacity and now weakening demand.

On Monday morning, there will be a chip industry summit of sorts: the world's largest chipmaker and the world's largest chip foundry will make a strategic announcement at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. Whatever the deal is, it's probably something TSMC needs more desperately than Intel does. With its smaller chip customers swooning, one has to imagine Tsai might cut Intel a pretty sweet deal to get any business the chip giant would like to send his way.

Hundreds of laid-off Qimonda Richmond employees will not be paid their final paychecks or receive wages for vacation days and time off they earned before being dismissed by the memory-chip maker.

As co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel — as well as Intel's former chief executive and chairman — Gordon Moore has monitored the evolution of the computer-chip industry for more than half a century. "I don't have any crystal ball on that. Its seems like it's still going down. It's probably going to be 2010, more or less. I don't think we're falling off the edge of the Earth. But it's been a terrible shock to the whole system".

Intel and TSMC have scheduled a joint press conference on Monday (March 2), an unusual step for Intel, which has rarely outsourced any manufacturing to a third party. The event will be hosted by Intel execs Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group and Sean Maloney, the company's chief marketing officer. Both will be joined by TSMC execs Rick Tsai, TSMC's president and chief executive, and Jason Chen, TSMC's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing.

Freescale Semiconductor cut more jobs in Austin and elsewhere Wednesday as part of a yearlong campaign to reduce costs in the face of weak market demand. Through the end of January, Freescale had disclosed 228 job cuts in Austin. The company employed about 5,000 people in Austin and 23,000 worldwide before this week's job actions.

If you want to feel good about the economy, do not read any of the trade publications. They're predicting a continued downward slide in every imaginable aspect of the industry except for MEMS. If you pick up anyone's iPhone nowadays you'll find perhaps 50 or more of these applications, all of which are essentially useless but kind of interesting in a very nerdy way.

President Barack Obama has launched a bid to transform the US political landscape, with a 3.55-trillion-dollar budget mapping out the sweeping scale of his administration's ambitions. The document handed to Congress bristled with spending on healthcare, climate change, the military and education, included a rosy prediction of a return to growth next year and raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Wacker Chemie AG, a German chemical company, announced Thursday that it will build a $1 billion plant with 500 jobs in southeastern Tennessee to produce hyperpure polycrystalline silicon, a product used to make solar panels and semiconductors.

While Spansion Inc. was cutting 3,000 jobs on Monday, the company's board was restoring full pay to its top executives. The company had imposed a 10% pay cut in October for top executives. But in a securities filing Tuesday, Spansion said it was returning the executives and other key employees to full pay as part of an "employee retention program."

In the six weeks since Carol Bartz took over as Yahoo chief executive, she's interviewed employees and executives, learned the company's businesses, assessed what's good, diagnosed what's wrong, and now reorganized Yahoo management to set it on a new course.

The involuntary furlough, once a staple of boom-and-bust blue-collar industries like mining or automaking, is making its way into white-collar workplaces across the United States as employers try to cut costs quickly amid a deepening recession. With some 2.5 million jobs lost in the past six months, few furloughed workers are complaining about the unpaid time off.

The US housing market slump is nowhere near over and home prices will probably keep falling well into next year, one of the property market's best-known economists said.

Japan's exports plunged 45.7% in January compared with a year ago to hit the lowest figure in 10 years, official figures have shown. Imports exceeded exports by 952.6 billion yen (US$9.9 billion). It is the largest gap since records began in 1980. Demand for Japanese cars in particular dropped by 69%. Trade in electronics and other goods has also slumped as global economies and consumer spending contract, pushing Japan deeper into recession.