The Toronto District School Board is entering into a partnership with a solar energy company that will see aging school roofs repaired and solar panels put on the roofs of more than 400 schools.

Johnson Controls (JCI), the Milwaukee-based industrial systems conglomerate, wants to pull the plug on a joint ventures with French battery giant Saft.

GT Solar International has received the largest order to date for its polysilicon production equipment from South Korean firm OCI.

Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) has selected ST-Ericsson's Thor advanced HSPA+ modem to bring lightning-fast connectivity to its new Infuse 4G smartphone for the US market.

Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) plans to increase its stake in the Globalfoundries microchip business to over 90% by the end of 2011, according to a senior executive. ATIC's stake rises as it pours investment into Globalfoundries, in which it last year acquired a 65.8% stake for US$2.1 billion.

The acquisition of SiGe, a fabless semiconductor provider, complements Skyworks' leadership in wide area front-end solutions by adding SiGe's innovative short range, silicon-based products.

Apple has proposed a standardized SIM card smaller than those it currently uses in the iPhone and iPad in order to be able to produce thinner devices, an Orange executive was quoted as saying in a Reuters report.

Spansion has entered production of its 1Gb and 512Mb GL NOR flash memory for automotive, consumer electronics, gaming and telnet applications.

Disruptions and shortages continue to loom over MCU product suppliers who are already facing severe pressure in the supply chain.

The cost of efficient yet pricey LED light bulbs could fall by 50 percent in the next five years, according to the top Philips Lighting executive in the U.S.

SanDisk has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pliant Technology, a developer of enterprise solid state drives (SSD). Under the terms of the agreement, SanDisk will pay approximately US$327 million in cash and provide certain equity-based incentives.

Texas Instruments has announced it would sell a multi-tranche debt offering to partially fund its merger with National Semiconductor.

"In the near term, both companies should benefit by cross-selling their products to largely non-overlapping customer bases," writes Linley Gwennap with The Linley Group. "For the longer term, the acquisition gives Nvidia an opportunity to expand the market for "Tegra" by developing single-chip products that combine the application and baseband processors."

Canadian Solar Inc.'s first-quarter profit soared as shipments jumped and gross margins expanded, although the bottom line missed analysts expectations as silicon costs increased and the company recorded a derivatives loss.

This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus' breakthrough technologies available for licensing with complementary technologies from CRI that include patented innovations and solutions for content protection, network security, anti-counterfeiting and financial services.

A US appeals court found memory chip designer Rambus Inc was wrong to shred hundreds of boxes of documents relevant in two patent infringement lawsuits it filed, sending its shares down sharply.

The 30 new jobs come in addition to the previously announced 300 engineers and technicians positions that Samsung Austin Semiconductor is hiring in the first six months of 2011.