Japan's Toshiba is in talks to buy US chip maker Spansion, two industry sources said, in the latest sign of pressure for consolidation in the struggling memory sector. However, Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said his company was not in talks to buy Spansion, and was also not considering such a move.

AMD plans to announce Tuesday that it will split into two companies - one focused on designing microprocessors and the other on manufacturing them. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms will inject at least US$6 billion into the two firms, mostly to finance a new chip factory that AMD planned to build near Albany, NY, and to upgrade one of the company's existing plants in Dresden, Germany.

The operator didn't disclose how many devices it has sold, so it's not clear that this is evidence of overwhelming demand for the G1, the first phone to run Google's Android software. The news follows reports last week that some customers trying to preorder a G1 were told there were none left. At the time, T-Mobile said there were still a limited number available.

...PV support is shaky in the European Union. In Spain, a new cap on solar electric installations of 300 MWp in 2009 could maroon more than a gigawatt worth of product. Other than Germany, which has implemented market controls, there's nowhere else for these stranded megawatts to go. In the United States, incentives remain weak in what is essentially a one-state market: California. However, even there, government incentives are necessary to fuel the willingness to deploy what remains a costly technology.

Our plan is to directly take legal action against the Japanese government, said Park Hyun, a Hynix spokesman. Park, however, didn't give the exact timing of the action but added that it wouldn't be this month. Hynix's challenge against Tokyo came following the US' decision not to renew punitive tariffs on its semiconductors. The European Union dropped tariffs on Hynix in April this year.

Sumita Optical Glass and Toyoda Gosei developed a glass-packaged white LED and showcased it at CEATEC JAPAN 2008.

South Korea, the world's top memory chip producer, suffered a drop in semiconductor exports for a third straight month in September amid a market glut and a slow US economy, data showed Sunday. Statistics at the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, disclosed by Yonhap news agency, showed semiconductor exports plunged 9.9% year-on-year to US2.96 billion in September, a consecutive fall since July.

The finding, reported on Sunday in the journal Nature Materials, offers a new way to process conventional silicon by slicing the brittle wafers into ultrathin bits and carefully transferring them onto a flexible surface. "We can make it thin enough that we can put it on plastic to make a rollable system. You can make it gray in the form of a film that could be added to architectural glass," said John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led the research.

.."We are doubling the number of our R&D engineering staff from the existing figure of 2,000 to 4,000 within the next two years for our Noida facility," Zutshi said. The company is planning to put special emphasis on the LCD TV and Flat CRT TV segments as part of its growth strategy..

A Trend Micro security product manager has recommended people not to buy anti-virus products, including his own. But there is a method to his madness, he assures. David Peterson, consumer segment director for Trend Micro's ANZ business, said only a handful of the top 10 security threats these days are viruses, with downloaders, Trojans, keyloggers, and phishing scams filling up the list.

In light of recent advances, Kool said, ASML has concluded that EUV is the most likely successor to 193nm imaging. Accordingly, the company is investing in manufacturing space and developing a production exposure platform...

Taiwanese flat-panel maker HannStar Display yesterday confirmed plans to cut 12% of its local work force when it shuts down a costly panel module assembly line next month. But the Taoyuan-based panel supplier said it would not trim output like its bigger rivals to cope with the latest downturn caused by a supply glut and economic weakness. While cutting its work force in Taiwan, LCD panel maker is moving a larger portion of the firm’s labor-intensive module assembly work to China.

"Our preliminary reaction is that SearchPerks will likely result (in) a sub-standard outcome," Aggarwal wrote in a report Thursday. "In our view, attempts like this one can in fact hurt Microsoft's reputation in the eyes of end-users and advertisers."

...This is a huge accomplishment, especially because it is the first commercial network in the U.S. to use mobile WiMax technology. But given the paucity of devices available that can even access the network, Sprint is being forced to apply traditional broadband and wireless business models to the new network. And as a result, the company will initially compete with existing broadband services and 3G data services...

The strategy marks a major shift for Nintendo. Previous versions of the DS were mainly old-fashioned consoles that required cartridges to play games. With the DSi's Wi-Fi and SD card features, Nintendo pushes further into the digital platform business. That puts it squarely in competition against Apple, which has been luring big-name studios to sell downloadable blockbuster games for the iPhone through the App Store. Studios that might have had second thoughts about manufacturing cartridges for the DS now have an online distribution channel...