Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

PhotonStar LED Ltd has demonstrated a prototype luminaire with high efficiency and high Ra of 96 at 2700K, and a tunable white color temperature range of 2500K to 10,000K.

The ruling is a victory for defendants Qualcomm, Motorola, Spansion, STMicroelectronics NV, Freescale Semiconductor and ATI Technologies, a company purchased in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices. The commission's administrative law judge found that the two Tessera patents were valid, but weren't infringed by the defendants. "It's a great result," said Alex Rogers, Qualcomm's senior vice president and legal counsel.

The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy. The last two recessions (1990-1991 and 2001) lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year, according to the NBER. The current recession is one of the longest downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

German chip maker Qimonda, which is majority-owned by Infineon, needs a helping hand. Its memory chips are struggling in an oversupplied market, and the firm is burning cash at a rate of $250.0 million per quarter. Investors have deserted the company, while Infineon is desperately trying to offload as much of its stake as possible. If current talks with potential investors fail, the company faces a cash crisis in the next few months.

Taiwan stocks opened 0.55 percent lower on Monday, pulling back from a more than two-week closing high, as tech shares fell after a Hon Hai subsidiary said it would cut staff in Hungary and industry sources said TSMC aimed to cut costs by 20 percent.

Qimonda announced today that it is making progress in its discussions with strategic and financial investors on potential partnerships with Qimonda, and that it will delay the release of its financial results for the fourth quarter of its 2008 financial year and its full financial year ended September 30, 2008 until mid-December while these discussions are proceeding.

The center, jointly formed by Shanghai University and SVA Electron will lay the groundwork for a 2.5G AMOLED production base, which some experts say will attract an investment of about 1.5-2billion yuan.

Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.

Stores and online merchants were busier this weekend than they were a year ago, according to figures out Sunday, but signs persist that holiday shopping will suffer in the weakest economic climate in decades.

Gartner analysts have advised CIOs in the Asia Pacific region to plan for future growth. Speaking in the opening keynote presentation at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Sydney, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research Peter Sondergaard said that an economic downturn can be a perfect time to undertake projects that warrant priority, because of their impact on future growth.

Taiwan stocks rose 0.15 percent on Friday to a more than two-week closing high, as DRAM makers such as Powerchip surged after saying Japanese rival Elpida would boost its stake in their joint venture. DRAM chip makers surged, with Powerchip and Nanya Technology both up by their 7 percent daily limit, helping lift the electronics sub-index by 0.63 percent.