But shares of Veeco, which makes precision manufacturing equipment for the LED and data storage markets, slipped after hours as the company predicted some revenue slated for the fourth quarter may not come in until early next year.

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.

"New Product sales were led by particularly strong growth from the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families," said Moshe Gavrielov, Xilinx President and CEO. "Combined sales from these families more than doubled sequentially in the September quarter..."

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

NOR flash supplier Spansion has named Saied Tehrani as senior vice president of research and development. Tehrani joins Spansion from Everspin Technologies, a supplier of MRAMs, where he was founder and chief operating officer.

Western Digital has sought to reassure investors about the slowing hard-drive business, as the advent of tablet computers eats into computer demand.

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.

Programmable chipmaker Altera has forecast its sales would grow in the fourth quarter as China expands its wireless telephone infrastructure but some analysts warned that revenues could slow next year.

Infotech Enterprises, Verisilicon and Wipro have joined Globalsolutions, the sum of Globalfoundries' internal resources and ecosystem partners.

"With the Embedded Initiative, Altera is enabling designers in markets such as automotive, industrial, military and wireless to easily leverage a rich ecosystem of processor, OS and IP support all through a single design flow, and to reduce overall system cost..."

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.

TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. on Tuesday hiked its estimates for third-quarter revenue and income, citing strong demand.

"Beceem's talented teams of engineers in India and the US have been focused on enabling a 4G ecosystem of operators and equipment manufacturers to drive the deployment of 4G networks," said Scott Bibaud, Broadcom's Executive VP & GM of the Mobile Platforms Group. "We look forward to adding their innovative technologies to our product portfolio and providing these technologies to our customers."

Solar energy and wind power will be strategic industries leading Korea's economy, with the government deciding to invest 40 trillion won in the renewable energy field by 2015 in partnership with the private sector so they can take the place in the nation's economy semiconductors and shipbuilding had in the past.

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.

China-based BOE Technology has adopted SpringSoft's Laker Custom Layout Automation System as its standard custom chip design platform. SpringSoft said the long-time panel customer is expanding deployment of the Laker software from early 4.5G, 5G and 6G FPD product applications to its latest 8.5G offerings and institutes for advanced technology development.

"We booked EUR 1,297 million worth of systems in the third quarter of 2010 and expect bookings in the fourth quarter to exceed the Q3 level, confirming our potential for 2011 sales growth," said Eric Meurice, president and CEO of ASML.

In addition to the ISO/TS16949 certification, Grace has successfully rolled out its Automotive Zero Defect Program, which offers a set of tighter process control measures during wafer processing.

"I love the Generation Y term 'frenemy,' because today we're partners, tomorrow we're competitors," Sharp Solar senior vice president Eric Hafter said of his rival solar makers.

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.

OCZ Technology is teaming up with SandForce to deliver exceptional new SSD products that leverage SATA3 and cost-effective NAND flash components. OCZ is set to begin sample distribution to current and potential clients in the fourth quarter of 2010, with mass production beginning in the first quarter of 2011.

Microinverter maker Enphase Energy announced today that its microinverter technology will power 4.5MW of solar projects developed and operated by Main Street Power and financed by Morgan Stanley.

South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries and France's Saint-Gobain will jointly build the largest thin-film solar cell plant in South Korea.

The global dominance of South Korean chipmakers is unlikely to be toppled anytime soon, even as Japanese and Taiwanese rivals consider forging stronger ties, according to a ratings agency. "In the medium term, Elpida's and Taiwanese chipmakers' increased competitiveness is unlikely to unseat the Korean's established advantages in technology and scale..."