Samsung Electronics, the world's No. 1 maker of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens, said Monday it has been lowering its panel output by around 5% since August to cope with excess inventory amid lackluster demand from global markets.

A new report says that a complete switch to LED lighting in twelve niche markets could save consumers $22 billion in electricity costs. Plus, DOE has released the latest SBIR funding call.

Plasma panels continue to maintain a price gap with equivalent LCD TV panels. For example, 42" HD plasma panels (including power supply and optical filter) are now 25% less than 42" 720p LCD panel prices and 31% less than 1080p (including power supply). A similar comparison shows that 50" HD plasma panels are 45% less than 52" 1080p LCD panels (and 29% less than 50" 1080p plasma panels).

Taiwan's Central Bank said Thursday it was cutting a key interest rate for the second time in two weeks, amid slowing economic growth. The cut on the 10-day loan rate to 3.25% from 3.5% percent came because Taiwan's exports have declined while consumer and investment expenditures dropped, the Central Bank said. The announcement helped to stabilize the Taiwan stock market early Thursday after the benchmark index fell 9.3% in the last three trading days in the wake of the financial crisis in the U.S. and Europe.

SanDisk may have just concluded a multibillion-dollar patent licensing lawsuit with Samsung which could determine the future of both SanDisk and the flash industry at large. As SanDisk considers a US$5.8 billion takeover offer by the flash giant, private arbitration has given Sandisk rights to a technology that may well hold the future of flash memory.

Broadcom claims Qualcomm has double-dipped on its patents by charging a fee for the use of its technology and another fee for its use in combination with another product. It's a practice that is referred to as patent exhaustion. The lawsuit "further asserts that these practices constitute patent misuse that has brought Qualcomm a financial windfall and brought harm to the industry and consumers," Broadcom said in a statement. In addition to licensing its technology, Qualcomm also makes chips for phones using the same IP.

But a more immediate pinch could be felt across the industry as a result of the tightening credit, says Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at MIT's Sloan School of Business. The difficulty of obtaining credit will "affect innovation," Lo predicts. "The capital is not there, and all investors will have a harder time raising funds." The credit squeeze could prompt large technology firms that need plenty of capital to start looking elsewhere for extra investment, perhaps to countries with substantial foreign-currency reserves.

The Supreme Court has refused to consider appeals from Samsung Electronics in a case against Rambus, a memory design and patent licensing company, closing a saga that began in 2005 over alleged patent infringement.

confidence, and cloudy visibility in the second half of the year have forced Gartner to lower its forecast for 2008 revenue growth in Asia/Pacific's semiconductor market. The research company in its Semiconductor DQ Monday Report yesterday decreased its estimate for the region from 6.4% to 5.2% growth on an annual basis.