Suntech Power has announced that it has beaten all previous records for multicrystalline silicon module conversion efficiency. The new world record conversion efficiency (aperture area only) was measured at 16.53%.

South Korean telecom regulators have approved the sale of Apple's iPhone in a market currently dominated by local handset manufacturers. Officials at KT, the country's number-two mobile service provider, said they plan to start selling iPhones next month.

Korea Exchange Bank sent out bid notices to around 40 conglomerates on September 7, and four to five were believed to be interested. But only textile conglomerate Hyosung submitted a letter of intent.

GTM Research says boom in US solar manufacturing to create 20,000 jobs between 2009 and 2012.

The organization responsible for Serial ATA has announced the formation of a mini-SATA spec, suitable for small-form-factor SATA drives and mini SSDs. The mSATA connector will still transmit up to 1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s SATA signals, but do so in a smaller connector.

A court in August had sentenced Lee Kun-Hee to a suspended three-year prison term and a fine of 110 billion won (91.2 million dollars) for his role in a 1999 bond issue.

LDK Solar is scheduled to complete the installation of more than 50 MaxEdge wafering systems in October.

"We continue to make progress in every aspect of the SunFab lines and are well on our way to delivering 10% efficient SunFab panels and US$1 per watt production costs in 2010," said company CTO Mark Pinto. He also laid out plans for SunFab panels with 12% conversion efficiency and module costs below US$0.70/watt by 2012.

Canon is reportedly telling customers it will no longer develop future, leading-edge lithography tools, namely 193nm dry and immersion scanners, according to industry sources.

Backend tool giant Kulicke & Soffa Industries has raised its revenue outlook for its fiscal fourth quarter ending October 3.

DRAM sales will probably climb 21% to US$22.4 billion in 2010, the first gain in four years, a Seoul-based analyst at Morgan Stanley wrote in a report.

In addition to a DRAM recovery, the NOR and NAND flash memory market has been extremely active. The volume of requests for Spansion and Numonyx flash memory has tripled over the last two months.

The SSD market has been one of several factors that have boosted demand for NAND flash memory and, as a result, boosted NAND flash prices, too. While this trend will likely continue to benefit Micron and SanDisk, it is equally likely to work against STEC in the longer term.

The IBM eDRAM in 32nm SOI technology is the fastest embedded memory announced to date, achieving latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds.

The serial-ATA (SATA) SSDs, from Samsung Electronics, are aimed at supporting virtualized environments and I/O intensive applications.

Rambus and Kingston Technology have jointly announced a collaborative development of a threaded module prototype using DDR3 DRAM technology.

"The worst is behind us. The upward trend has stabilized, so we now anticipate second-half sales growth of about 40% compared to the first half of 2009," said the analog/mixed-signal foundry.

Russia's government is in talks with Germany on buying a stake in Infineon Technologies, said AFK Sistema, tycoon Vladimir Yevtushenkov's holding company.

Buyers can expect price erosion for NOR flash memory for the rest of the year, but prices will stabilize in 2010, according to market researcher IC Insights.

"We believe this delay in fab closures is due to stronger than expected demand, and Fairchild wanting to continue manufacturing product at those facilities to meet this stronger than expected demand...

Samsung, which saw its operating profits jump five-fold to 2.5 trillion won in the second quarter, is expected to report 3.8 trillion won in the third, analysts said. The growth can be attributable to increases in chip and panel prices.

Nakaya Microdevices, Amkor Technology and Toshiba have jointly announced the start of their joint venture will be postponed. The operation was initially scheduled to begin on October 1.

"Semiconductor shipments rose to meet current OEM demand, after an overcorrection earlier this year, driving an increase in our variable royalty payments and consequently higher expected revenue for the quarter," said Harold Hughes, president and chief executive officer at Rambus.

Samsung Electronics has taken its first step towards the mass-production of its solar cells with the launch of a pilot production line for solar cells in Giheung. The vendor held a ceremony on September 13 to mark the opening of its R&D and testing facility for crystalline silicon solar cells.

The trial of former Infineon CEO Ulrich Schumacher has started today (Sept. 14) in Munich. Schumacher is charged with corruption in connection with Infineon's motor sport sponsoring business.

Cymer, the world's leading supplier of light sources used by chipmakers to create advanced semiconductor chips, now anticipates revenues for third-quarter 2009 to increase around 30% sequentially.

The European Semiconductor Sales index climbed 1.2% in July, says market research company e-forecasting.com. The indicator has increased month over months in a row over the last six months.

TSMC and SMIC reached a US$175 million deal in 2005 to settle a claim by TSMC. But the Taiwan-based company now alleges SMIC reneged on the deal, and oral arguments began yesterday in Oakland.

National Semiconductor's fiscal first-quarter profits dropped 63% as revenues fell by a third, but the analog chip maker indicated demand was rebounding.

Pliant Technology has released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second as the top competitive drives.