UK government funding is needed as the credit crunch threatens a generation of small high-tech companies, a business investment group has warned. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts said the UK could lose its global standing in areas such as healthcare and biotechnology.

TSMC's board of directors recently approved four candidates for Independent Director, including three current directors Peter Leahy Bonfield, Stan Shih and Carly Fiorina, as well as former Texas Instruments (TI) chairman Thomas J. Engibous. These four candidates for Independent Director will stand for election at TSMC's Annual General Meeting on June 10, 2009.

Memory IP specialist Mosaid Technologies and NXP Semiconductors BV have extended their patent license deal. However, troubled and insolvent memory maker Qimonda has terminated the six-year patent licensing agreement between the two companies that came into effect July 1, 2006.

German chipmaker Infineon is in negotiations with the government over state guarantees worth several hundred million euros (dollars), the Welt am Sonntag paper reported Sunday.

Shares of Toshiba opened down 6.9% on Monday after weekend reports that it plans to raise about US$5 billion in capital to bolster its finances, weakened by its loss-making chip operations and tax costs.

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba has said it is to cut a further 3,900 temporary jobs by March 2010 to cope with the global economic downturn. The news came as it said it expected to report a net loss of 350bn yen (US$3.5bn) for the year to March 2009.

Chinese major multicrystalline silicon wafer producer LDK Solar Wednesday announced that it had secured a 200-million-yuan loan from China Development Bank and received approval for a one-billion-yuan credit line from Agricultural Development Bank of China.

The group also has developed a 32nm process and says customers will be able to move to the more power-efficient 28nm technology without a major redesign. Among the members of the joint development alliance is GlobalFoundries, a manufacturing company formed by AMD and Advanced Technology Investment.

Chief executives from 28 large corporations, including Google, Cisco, Research in Motion (RIM) and Intel, sent President Barack Obama a letter on Mar. 25, urging him to support the Patent Reform Act of 2009. The problem, they say: Litigation costs and patent infringement damages are stifling innovation.

In its third layoff in recent times, silicon wafer supplier MEMC Electronic Materials has cut about 200 more jobs, according to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Renesas Technology, Japan's second-largest chipmaker, aims to return to profit next fiscal year by cutting labor, research and productions costs.

Micronic Laser Systems AB (STO:MICR), today received an order for a Prexision-8 laser pattern generator from a captive mask shop in Asia. The tool will be shipped in the second quarter of 2009.

In a recent interview, Globalfoundries vice president of manufacturing systems and technology Tom Sonderman said that the company plans to make GPUs using 28nm processes in the near future.

Japan's government is considering providing funds to Elpida Memory to bolster its capital, NHK said, without providing an amount or saying where it got the information.

ASML Holding NV, Europe's largest maker of semiconductor equipment, has reported a first-quarter loss as sales plunged 80% amid an industry slump. The net loss was 117 million euros (US$155 million), compared with a profit of 145 million euros a year earlier.

If Ontario's Bill 150 (the Green Energy and Green Economy Act) is passed as expected in May, Ontario will become the first North American jurisdiction with an incentive system modeled after the German feed-in tariffs (FITs), according to incentive expert Paul Gipe.

With Siltronic's aging Portland factory weathering one of the steepest downturns in its history, the German silicon wafer manufacturer is raising the prospect of renewal to city officials.

China's major solar wafer producer LDK Solar said that it still enjoys stable standing orders despite the on-going global financial crisis that significantly affected international solar cell markets.

It wasn't long ago that Silicon Valley's tech industry, whose operations and customers span the planet, was confident its global reach would help it escape the worst of the deep American recession. But that hasn't happened. Instead, the valley's top companies collectively are suffering the biggest slump since the dot-com bust.

According to Gartner Inc analysis, both memory segments showed some pricing gains in the business week ending April 10.

Qimonda AG's Portuguese unit said it's reducing its workforce to 1,000 and suspending the contracts of 800 of the remaining employees for six months.

"Samsung Electronics was asked to supply 50 million 8Gb NAND flash chips to Apple, while Hynix was set to supply 20 million," a high-ranking industry source told The Korea Times by Monday.

According to IC Insights' update to its 2009 forecast, released Thursday, the "perfect storm" of negative factors that have damaged business in the first half of 2009 will bring about a much more "friendly" environment for the IC industry in the second half of the year.

SandForce has announced a new family of solid-state disk (SSD) processors that the company claims will allow lower-cost, commodity NAND flash memory to be used in data center operations. The disks will also be faster and more reliable for use in mobile applications, the company said.

The Japanese government will lift punitive tariffs on computer chips South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor makes, leading to a settlement of a three-year-old trade dispute between the two countries, Kyodo News reported Monday, citing Finance Ministry officials.