Toshiba will outsource fabrication of system chips to South Korea's Samsung Electronics, freeing up resources for its memory chip operations, the Nikkei business daily has reported.

The upgrade reflects improving 2011 prospects for NAND flash memory demand, driven by tablets, smartphones and solid-state drives. The improving demand picture offsets concerns about higher supply due to new NAND fabs from Samsung, Toshiba and Micron expanding production in 2011.

Yonhap news agency quoted sources at the local government as saying Samsung plans to build the lines by 2016, but the spokesperson said details have yet to be decided.

ASML now expects fourth-quarter bookings to be above two billion euro. "NAND flash memory investments for the high volume ramp of new technologies and foundry/logic commitments for new strategic fab projects are driving brisk lithography demand for 2011..."

Intellectual Ventures has filed patent lawsuits against nine tech companies. The first lawsuit targets software security vendors Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Check Point. The second lawsuit targets DRAM and flash memory vendors Hynix and Elpida. The third names FPGA vendors Altera, Lattice and Microsemi, which recently acquired Actel and its FPGA business.

Infineon Technologies was sued by the insolvency administrator of Qimonda who filed an action in a Munich court seeking a liability judgment for an unspecified amount.

Following the acquisition of Numonyx earlier this year, Micron Technology has reorganized its memory operations. The company has also recruited Tom Eby, a former executive vice president and chief marketing and sales officer at NOR rival Spansion.

Sony, Nikon and SanDisk have developed a new specification for CompactFlash memory cards that promises photographers the ability to continuously shoot high-quality RAW images. The proposed new format supports data transmission at up to 500MBps, according to their joint statement.

Integrated Silicon Solution (ISSI) has announced that it is working with Micron Technology to become an alternate supplier of Micron's third-generation reduced-latency DRAM (RLDRAM 3 memory).

Shares of SanDisk jumped Monday after a Robert W. Baird analyst upgraded the stock, projecting better prices for the company's flash memory cards heading into next year. The analyst even predicted there could be NAND shortages in the second half of 2011.

Toshiba will shut its No.2 plant in Yokkaichi, central Japan, by the end of December and phase out low-end chips used in products such as memory sticks. The company will also farm out production of so-called logic chips next year to cut costs at a business that's "barely breaking even."

The sale of new tablet PCs and smartphones with solid-state storage technology is compensating for weak demand for memory cards and USB flash drives, and has led to a 17% quarter-to-quarter increase in NAND flash shipments and an average price drop of about 9%.

The company's US subsidiaries, Qimonda North America and Qimonda Richmond, have acknowledged the parent's ownership of over 800 patents and patent applications and abandoned claims of over US$2.1 billion against Qimonda. "We will now put all our efforts into continuing to exploit the patent portfolio by licensing and selling individual packages," said Qimonda insolvency administrator Michael Jaffe.

Rambus saw its results improve in the third quarter of 2010 thanks to a licensing deal signed earlier this year with former legal opponent Samsung Electronics. It is negotiating to renew deals with Toshiba and Renesas Electronics after their patent licenses expired.

The complete Spansion SPI product portfolio now spans densities from 4Mb through 256Mb.

Toshiba's operating profits for the April-September period is set to come to more than 100 billion yen (US$1.2 billion), beating the company's forecast of 70 billion yen, according to the Nikkei business daily. Booming global sales of smartphones have boosted demand for the company's flash memory chips and small LCD panels.

The world's largest memory chipmaker is forecast to invest US$9.2 billion in its semiconductors business next year, according to an industry report.

A Glass Lewis release said: "Micron Technology's performance has steadily deteriorated during the past three years, culminating in a US$1.8 billion loss in 2009 and a return on equity of negative 33.9%, one of the lowest among the companies appearing on our Overpaid 25 list." Micron has not had a good return from its investment in Appleton based on these figures.

The Nikkei business daily recently reported that the resistive random access memory chip to be developed by Elpida and Sharp could write data 10,000 times faster than NAND flash memory technology, while consuming less power. The next-generation memory chip is expected to be commercialized around 2013.

"Memory chip prices are expected to continue their downtrend even through the first half of next year, but they will likely bounce back from the middle of the second quarter," said Kwon Oh-hyun, president of Samsung's semiconductor division. Hynix CEO Kwon Oh-chul echoed his view, but said a price rebound may not start until the second half of 2011.

Revenue in the company's core SSD product line totaled US$20.2 million, an increase of 81% from the US$11.1 million posted in the second quarter of fiscal 2010. "The discontinuance of our commodity memory products has allowed us to aggressively reallocate resources towards SSD growth," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.

Micron Technology has disclosed in an SEC filing that Samsung has agreed to pay the company US$275 million under a new 10-year patent cross-licensing agreement.

Elpida Memory plans to issue 60 billion yen (US$730 million) in convertible bonds and use the funds for bond redemption and capital spending, a source familiar with the matter said.

Adesto Technologies, a memory startup funded by Applied Materials and others, is readying its first conductive-bridging random access memory (CBRAM) product. CBRAM is seen as a potential candidate to replace conventional flash memory. Other candidates include FRAM, MRAM, phase-change and RRAM.

Elpida Memory president and CEO Yukio Sakamoto said in an interview that the company is delaying plans to boost production capacity at its Taiwanese unit. "Through the summer, demand for PC memory didn't rise as much I had expected," Sakamoto said. "If there's no demand, there's no point in adding capacity."

Oracle has sued Micron Technology, alleging it overcharged Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired, by conspiring to fix prices for computer memory chips.

In a nutshell, DRAM suffers from data and power concerns, NAND flash is plagued by reliability issues, and system integration is becoming more complex...

Freescale has prequalified all three densities of Spansion Multi-I/O SPI, 32-megabits (Mb), 64Mb and 128Mb devices with all three densities shipping in volume production today.

Violin Memory has introduced a 40TB capacity flash memory array for enterprises that uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND and costs less than US$16 per GB.

"Memory fundamentals have slipped more rapidly than we had anticipated due to weak PC and consumer electronics demand," Auriga USA told clients, adding later: "It now seems highly likely that MU's gross margin will dip over the next several quarters as DRAM and NAND pricing continues to weaken."

LG Group said on September 17 it will not buy Hynix Semiconductor, dismissing market speculation that the group will join a bidding race for the purchase of a major stake in the memory chipmaker.

Pliant Technology has introduced a new family of lower-cost, higher-capacity solid state drives (SSD) based on consumer-grade NAND flash memory but built for data center use.

"It's difficult to set a clear plan for the coming year 2011, but we're considering around 30 trillion won [in investments]," Samsung Electronics CEO Choi Gee-sung told reporters on the sidelines of consumer-electronics show IFA on September 3.

Memristors made from pure silicon could enable resistive random access memory (ReRAM) that are simpler and cheaper to manufacture than Hewlett-Packard's titanium-based formulation, according to researchers at Rice University.

Globalfoundries and Freescale Semiconductor have jointly announced plans to bring a new class of thin film storage (TFS) flash memory products to market on 90nm technology.

It looks like we should expect frequencies introduced at 2,133MHz and it will scale to over 4.2GHz with DDR4.

OCZ Technology is discontinuing the production of some lower-margin DRAM products as part of a shift to focus on higher-margin specialty and high-performance memory products.

Verigy, which makes products that test flash memory, high-speed computer memory chips and SoC devices, previously posted seven straight quarters of red ink, though recent losses had narrowed.

Hynix said in a filing to the Korea Exchange that it plans to invest 677.0 billion won (US$572.7 million) to expand an existing facility.