EDA vendors Mentor Graphics and Magma Design Automation have both reported quarterly revenues that exceeded Wall Street estimates and their own sales targets, but offered outlooks for the current quarter that fell short of analysts' expectations.

This project seeks to optimize the patterning process from design to manufacturing, extend characterization tools and methods to develop new correction and compensation techniques for reducing variability. The project will also explore lithography options for manufacturing complex chips at sub-30nm nodes.

Rambus has announced that Samsung Electronics will offer a 1Gb XDR DRAM memory device, which will broaden the availability of XDR technology for gaming, computing and consumer electronics applications.

"DRAM revenues historically fall by 20% in the first quarter, but I don't think it will fall that much in 2010...," said Hynix CEO Kim Jong-Kap on the sidelines of semiconductor equipment trade show Semicon Japan.

"The group's top decision makers have reached a broad consensus that more measures would be needed to nurture future growth engines. But that doesn't necessarily mean LG will participate in an auction next month," an LG representative said. Despite such internal views, market analysts say LG could be the "right buyer" for Hynix.

The fall in cost is due to the increased lifetime, according to the independent EU Energy Institute.

Samsung Electronics plans to invest around seven trillion won (US$6.05 billion) in its semiconductor business for 2010 - five trillion won in DRAM and two trillion won in NAND flash memory and system LSI, according to industry sources.

Spansion has announced its MirrorBit flash memory is now available as a verified configuration solution for the new Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family.

"Apple has asked Korean semiconductor makers to produce a certain amount of chips for its digital products, only to actually purchase a smaller volume eventually. The company doesn't make immediate purchases, but waits until chip prices to fall to the level it internally targets..."

Passenger car sales at Ford Motor's China joint venture will likely rise by close to 50% in 2009, partly due to government incentives for purchases of small vehicles, according to Nigel Harris, general manager of the joint venture.

OCZ said it will demonstrate an external hard drive at the CES show in Las Vegas. The drive uses Symwave's USB 3.0 storage controller and will deliver 10 times the transfer rate of USB 2.0 - which transfers data at 5Gb/s.

The Portuguese DRAM test and assembly operation subsidiary of insolvent Qimonda has been offered a financial life line and is taking on a new name, according to local reports.

"Once the STT-MRAM is developed, South Korea may be able to control roughly 45% of the 30nm type memory chip market by 2015..."

European regulators are set to accept a proposal by Rambus to cut royalties to settle antitrust charges, according to a person familiar with the situation.

"If there is no potential buyer this time, we will seek other measures to build a new structure of the company, on which all the stakeholders and interested parties can agree," according to the Korea Exchange Bank, the main creditor of Hynix.

The consensus is that availability of defect-free masks and, perhaps more importantly, a lack of funding for an infrastructure that can inspect those masks, is the most critical issue faced today by EUV lithography development. But working groups are making progress defining - and funding - the solution.

Samsung Electronics has set its 2010 capital expenditure at 8.5 trillion won (US$7.4 billion), up from this year's planned seven trillion won, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported in its early Thursday edition.

Samsung Electronics, the world's top maker of memory chips, has dismissed market speculation that it may bid for German chipmaker Infineon. "Such talk is untrue...we have never studied the possibility."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is likely to make CDMA2000 baseband chips which Qualcomm designs for the worldwide-version 3G iPhones, according to industry executives.

DuPont Apollo has announced the opening of its silicon based thin-film photovoltaic module manufacturing facility. The 538,000-square-feet facility will have an annual capacity of up to 50 megawatts with a thin-film-on-glass PV module production line. Full-scale commercial production is slated for the first quarter of 2010.

Sematech wants to expand its wings. The chip-making consortium is now looking at ways to bring fabless companies into the fold and is also hoping to expand its collaborative efforts with fab tool makers.

Ericsson has withdrawn its complaint to the European Commission regarding Qualcomm's WCDMA (3G) licensing activities. The company will, however, continue its ongoing dialogue with competition authorities around the world in relation to Qualcomm's licensing practices.