The sharp downward pressure on prices of high-brightness LED chips should start to ease after manufacturers pushed out a number of planned installations of production equipment originally scheduled for 2011.

Acuity will add to its long list of lighting brands with the cash acquisition of Horizon Control, a company that has focused on PC-based lighting-control systems.

Shares of solar energy technology provider First Solar (FSLR) are down $5.55, or 5%,at $98.91 this morning after the company last night announced its former chief financial officer, Jens Meyerhoff, currently head of its division that sells projects to utilities, will leave the company at the end of September.

Schott Solar has received a PV module order to supply a pair of projects in Thailand with a cumulative capacity of 16.9MWp. The 9.7MW and 6.2MW sites, located north of Bangkok, are being built by Phoenix Solar Singapore and are scheduled to be completed and activated by the end of the year.

Michael Van Buskirk, former chief technology officer at Spansion and a longtime engineer at AMD, was named CTO of non-volatile memory chip startup Adesto Technologies Tuesday (Aug. 16).

Flying in the face of the shaky market conditions seen in the first half of 2011, Chinese photovoltaic product manufacturer JinkoSolar has bucked the trend to post positive second quarter 2011 results.

Silex Systems is to close the only Australian manufacturing facility of solar cells for PV panels, saying it can no longer compete with imported cells, and cannot afford the continued investment given the uncertainty of clean energy policy in NSW and the rest of Australia.

The new Dimension Edge PSS atomic force microscope from Bruker Corporation delivers precise 3D profile information to control advanced patterned sapphire substrate processes for LED manufacturing.

PCs are going the way of typewriters, vinyl records and vacuum tubes, said an IBM engineer who worked on the development of the 5150 and owns three of the nine patents for it. PCs will still be "much used" in the future but are no longer the force for innovation they once were.

Silver prices have been bad news for photovoltaics of late. Their continuing spike is causing ripples across the photovoltaic manufacturing industry as it forces companies to find cost-effective solutions to the super-conductive metal or face losses.

Only hours after PV-Tech reported that Evergreen Solar had said it was in detailed and time-consuming negotiations with holders of its 13% Convertible Senior Secured Notes due 2015, which had caused the company to delay quarterly SEC filings, the company has said it has filed for voluntarily bankruptcy, under US Chapter 11 bankruptcy codes.

Completion of the merger is slated for the second half of 2011.

China is putting a competitive squeeze on some of its partners that still use the mainland as a source of low-cost design and manufacturing. Good Will Instrument, a 700-person test and measurement company in Taiwan, is just one of the companies feeling the pinch.

SandForce has announced the first public demonstration of its SSD controllers working in concert with Toshiba's 24nm MLC NAND flash for SSD applications. SandForce also revealed that to data, it has shipped well over two million SSD controllers.

The JV is based on the MoU signed in December 2010, under the framework for reinforcing cooperation in economic and industrial development between the Brazilian and Japanese governments, including the cultivation of a Brazilian semiconductor industry.

The European Union has launched a legal challenge against Canada at the World Trade Organization to protest against provincial backing for solar and wind energy projects, the bloc's executive said on Thursday.

Seagate has shipped its one millionth solid state hybrid drive for laptop PCs after launching the product - Momentus XT - in spring 2010. Major computer makers including Alienware, ASUS, Dell, Sony and Toshiba now offer laptops powered by the 2.5-inch drive.

Bridgelux expects to begin making LED chips on silicon wafers in about two years, a technology transition which promises to slash LED lighting costs.

Centrotherm Photovoltaics AG (CTN), a German maker of production equipment for the solar industry, rose the most in almost three years, buoyed by surging sales in Asia.

Despite a significant increase in sales in the second quarter of 2011, Q-Cells has warned that losses reached ??95.8 million in the first half of the year, due to price declines, inventory write-offs and other one time issues.

SanDisk has implemented the new SATA 繕SSD specification into its SanDisk iSSD product line of postage stamp-sized embedded SSDs.

Monday's announcement that China is to introduce a national photovoltaic feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme was received well by many in the industry, however analyst opinion is that the Chinese tier-one manufacturers stand to gain the most.

OmniVision is promising an quarter-inch, 8-megapixel OV8850 CMOS sensor that the company says is 20% slimmer than any competing 8-megapixel module.