The analyst do not expect a meaningful acceleration in enterprise SSD adoption in 2010, but his analysis suggests as system availability improves in the second half of 2010, shipments are set to grow dramatically in 2011.

Infineon Technologies has announced that result and revenues for the quarter ending September 30, 2010 will be better than expected.

Many existing products are built with planar transistors - efficient, low-cost transistors that were invented in 1959. But many chip makers are starting to look at other transistor designs that may be easier to shrink beyond the 20nm size. TSMC appears to be settling on FinFETs because their fish-fin design reduces the size of working transistors.

Retail juggernaut Wal-Mart is using panels from First Solar and MiaSole in what is expected to be one of the largest business installations of thin-film solar technology.

"We believe the company has selected Qualcomm as its modem supplier for the CDMA iPhone as well as for the iPhone 5," said a managing director and analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. "The iPhone 5 will likely use a two-chip modem, allowing the company to create 3G and 4G products."

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.

Japan's Sanyo Electric will close two of its domestic semiconductor plants by 2012, and move production to another plant along with about 1,000 workers, according to the Nikkei business daily.

He pushed the silicon foundry giant into the platform arena. TSMC originally launched the so-called Open Innovation Platform in 2008 as an industry-wide design enablement initiative.

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee has signaled that the company's component businesses have reached a peak, suggesting that profit may fall in 2011 from this year's record level.

"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.

Koo Bon-joon, the head of trading firm LG International, will take over from Nam Yong, who resigned from the top job to take responsibility for poor management, LG said on Friday.

"The SiT8503 leverages its silicon MEMS technology and programmable architecture to offer many unique features that are not available from quartz, such as frequency and voltage configurability, small size, low power and extreme ruggedness," said Piyush Sevalia, VP of marketing at SiTime.

Peter Lehner, a blogger for Natural Resource Defense Council, recently visited China and Trina Solar. An interesting article on his visit.

The executive also said the outlook for chip demand remains solid for the remainder of this year, but cautioned another cyclical downturn could be in store next year as industry capacity continues to increase.

"We have put on hold the purchase of copper wire bonders," said Byron Chiang, spokesperson for Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), on the phone. "Orders are not coming along as strong as we originally thought."

Rudolph Technologies has received an order for its multiple PrecisionWoRx VX4 probe card test and analysis systems from a customer in Taiwan to facilitate capacity expansion.

Over the years, ATREG has been involved in the sale of several fabs, including for clients Qimonda, Atmel, IDT, Freescale Semiconductor and others.

MIT chemical engineers have devised a way to use carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms) to form antennas that capture and focus light energy, resulting in more powerful and smaller solar arrays.

Disappointing sales forecasts from National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments triggered the sell-off. The letdown comes just two weeks after Intel warned its sales for July through September would fall below its earlier projections.

Analog chip vendor Texas Instruments has lowered the upper end of its forecast range for third-quarter profit and sales, indicating that semiconductor demand may be slipping as economic growth slows.

Altera has announced that its revenues for the third quarter are now expected to grow 10-14% on quarter. The company's prior guidance was for sequential growth of 4-8%.

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.

Intel's new chip - code named Moorestown - would result in smart phone visuals and remove the need for a separate graphics chip in computers.

Earlier this week Samsung unveiled the new processor for smartphones, tablets and netbooks, which is codenamed Orion. Analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) said our "checks suggest that this processor also uses ARM GPU".

Anadigics has announced that its AWT6264 power amplifier drives the WiMAX connectivity in Samsung's recently-released Epic 4G handset.

Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers.

Don't look now, but a fab tool downturn could be on the horizon.

Silicon Valley may be an epicenter of the nascent electric car industry, but don't expect the battery revolution to mimic the computer revolution, one of IBM's top energy storage scientists advises.

ARM has reiterated that it wouldn't make sense for a rival to purchase the company after shares rose on takeover speculation.

The cells make use of proteins from the machinery of plants, turning sunlight into electric charges that can do work. The self-repairing mechanism, reported in Nature Chemistry, could lead to much longer-lasting solar cells

"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.

"We believe Globalfoundries will continue to ramp capacity over the next few quarters despite a weakening macro environment," said an analyst with Needham & Co. LLC, in a report. "We estimate Globalfoundries' capex will grow from about US$2.6 billion in 2010 to US$3.0-4.0 billion in 2011..."

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.

LDK Solar said it has filed a lawsuit against solar module maker Canadian Solar demanding compensation from contract termination.

IBM has announced details of what it claims is the world's fastest computer chip - the microprocessor in a new version of the IBM mainframe that begins shipping to customers on September 10.