Germany's next government plans to reduce incentives to generate solar power as early as 2010, the energy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats said.

Qimonda already laid off 600 staff in April this year. Another 800 employees were sent on forced leave. Now, 590 of these will be laid off, while the remaining 200 employees will continue their force leave, according to local Portuguese media reports.

Elpida Memory plans to increase its stake in Rexchip Electronics to 71% by the end of 2009, Nikkei English News said, without citing anyone.

SanDisk is incorporating the X4 chips into existing storage cards, without any identifying labeling or change in pricing. The fact that it is not immediately passing cost savings on to consumers is a sign of easing conditions in the volatile market.

A better global economy and the launch of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system are expected to support demand for memory chips through the first half of 2010, the chief executive of Hynix Semicondcutor has commented.

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology, has announced it has partnered with Spyrus for hardware-based encryption, authentication, and digital content security products.

Tokyo Electron, the world's No.2 supplier of machines used to make microchips after Applied Materials, has said orders were 83 billion yen (US$931.5 million) in July-September, nearly double from the previous quarter's 48.7 billion yen.

This purchase for automated NSX Inspection Systems with Discover yield management software reflects a trend to incorporate real-time process control into advanced back-end fabrication processes, according to Rudolph Technologies.

Don't bet on it. The retiring chairman and CEO of National Semiconductor may be taking a break but the industry will still be hearing from him.

Chip design outsourcing growth fell to 6.5% in 2008, down from nearly 34% the year earlier, and the number of chip design starts are expected to fall another 18% this year...

Hynix, IMEC, Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and possibly TSMC are the initial customers for ASML's "pre-production" extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool, according to an analyst.

Samsung sees size and power benefits in phase-change memory (PCM), a memory type that is being pushed as a replacement for memory that goes into devices like mobile phones today.

If you thought that quality among DRAM DIMMs was evenly distributed, or that most DRAM errors are not due to hardware problems, Google has proven you wrong.

IMEC's revenues will be down only about 5% this year, compared to drops of 20% generally among electronics vendors. "R&D is the last part to cut because they need to continue to innovate," said company CEO Van den hove.

Dongbu has begun shipping the display chip used in 19-inch computer monitors to LG Display. The contract will pave the way for us to strengthen our position as a display chip-focused manufacturer," a company spokesman Kwon Ki-joo has said.

The European Commission's new proposal to boost solar technology development focuses too much on research and not enough on deploying commercial technologies, according to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA).

The cell chip in Toshiba's TV is the same as the one in Sony's PS3.

If the current IC recovery will continue or fall back into a dreaded double dip, specialty foundry vendors also see a new competitive threat on the horizon: TSMC.

As China primes its energy market for explosive growth, the country could see one gigawatt of solar power generation capacity by 2011, said a new report by GTM Research.

By the end of 2011, ARM will be a "small but significant" PC processor architecture, said a Gartner analyst.

Samsung Electronics has estimated it made a record quarterly operating profit of 4.1 trillion won (3.5 billion dollars) in July-September. Consolidated sales for the quarter are estimated at 36 trillion won, up from 30.27 trillion a year ago.

The R&D costs for process technology are expected to climb from US$310-to-US$400 million for the 90nm to 65nm nodes, to US$600-to-US$900 million for 45nm to 32nm, to US$1.3 billion for 22nm to 12nm. A fab would run from US$2.5-to-US$3.5 billion for the 90nm to 65nm nodes, to US$3.5-to-US$4 billion for 45nm to 32nm, to US$4.5-to-US$6 billion for 22nm to 12nm.