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...

After more than 30 years pitching first Macintosh computers and then iPod media players to consumers, Apple is using the iPhone to attract a new audience: business buyers. Jobs is seeking to recharge a stock that's shed 49% in 2008 and to keep momentum after revenued almost quadrupled in the past 5 years. Apple gets at least 80% of sales from consumers and half its revenue from the US, putting the computer maker at risk if people cut spending amid economic turmoil.

Nokia has announced a solid release date for Comes With Music, as well as the first compatible handsets. The unlimited music download service is set to arrive on a small handful of models, both old and new, in the UK starting October 16, with the US and other countries slated for sometime in early 2009.

Apple has announced via its Apple Developer Connection website that it has dropped the NDA that has left iPhone developers frustrated since the release of iPhone OS 2.0 this past July. In a note addressed "To Our Developers," Apple finally admitted that the NDA had "created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone's success."

Hardware verification languages have been around for over ten years now, with steadily growing adoption throughout this entire period. This adoption has been driven largely by the inability of manual directed verification approaches to keep pace with the complexity of the verification space for leading-edge design.

Chiu's remarks came after Tuesday's meeting of an economic advisory task force, during which VP Vincent Siew broached the subject of a sovereign fund. But the council said that it was not the government's priority to create a sovereign wealth fund, because such funds are intended for investment abroad, while the government needs money to finance public works at home. Council vice chairman San Gee said the most urgent task facing the country was to stimulate economic growth through domestic construction projects.

..Nintendo president Satoru Iwata took the wraps off the DSi, which packs a bulit-in camera, music playback and a bigger display than the current model. The DSi will ship in Japan on November 1, migrating to the US in 2009. It will sell for 18,900 yen, which translates to about US$179.

HP today became the second major storage vendor to make a big move into the iSCSI market this year, with a US$360 million acquisition of LeftHand Networks. The move follows Dell's US$1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic earlier this year and adds HP's name to the list of vendors chasing the fast-growing IP storage market.

...India, with nearly 300 million mobile users, is the second-largest wireless market in the world after China, and has the potential for further huge growth as just over a quarter of its population have cellphones now. Operators are signing up 8-9 million users every month, and Gartner, a consultancy, expects 737 million connections by 2012.

In the Gartner report, analysts Ken McGee and Mark McDonald cite government data, results of a survey of about 1,000 CIOs, and recent quarterly reports from top vendors to reaffirm an assessment made earlier this year that IT spending won't turn negative. Tech stocks have taken a beating on Wall Street but have recovered some this week.

Legislation extending tax credits for the solar, wind and biodiesel industries gained new life on Wednesday as Senate leaders said they plan to attach the tax bill to a US$700 billion economic rescue package.

In 2007, the sector attracted US$2.2 billion in venture-backed investments, up 45% from 2006. Biofuels production jumped from 4.9 billion gallons in 2006 to roughly 6.5 billion gallons last year. Meanwhile, in 2007 the US added 314 megawatts of new solar energy systems to the grid, up by 125% from the previous year.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is investing US$17.6 million in six projects that aim to develop prototype photovoltaic (PV) components and systems that will be commercialised by 2010.