Unlike the SEMI Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Subscription (WWSEMS) data, the World Fab Forecast and its related Fab Database reports track any equipment needed to ramp the fab, upgrade, expand, or change its wafer size regardless if it is new equipment, used equipment, or transferred equipment, while WWSEMS tracks only new equipment.

Responding to the IC downturn, Microchip Technology has lowered its forecast, taken pay cuts and reduced its IC production rates. "General economic and semiconductor industry conditions have continued to decline since our October earnings call," said Steve Sanghi, Microchip's president and CEO, in a statement. "As a result of these conditions, we are continuing with a pay cut for all of our worldwide non-manufacturing employees which was implemented during the December quarter."

The SD Association has announced the next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification which will provide up to 2TB storage capacity and accelerate SD interface read/write speeds to 104MB/s this year, with a road map to 300MB/s. Specifications for the new SDXC standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009.

STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, NXP, and Renesas Technology each said they received surprise visits from investigators in late October. All of them were raided by European Commission investigators seeking information of collusion in the market for chips used in smart cards.

CSR is claiming it is possible to simplify and speed the development of Bluetooth headsets with high quality stereo audio with a new type of software development kit.

Silicon foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is mulling plans to buy ProMOS, according to sources. In the plan, TSMC would buy ProMOS' fabs and would shed the company's memory business, sources said.

Taiwan's exports slumped by a record 41.9% in December on weaker demand from the US and China for laptops, mobile phones and computer chips.

Driven by increasing demand from mobile devices and automotive applications, wafer-level packaging (WLP) is moving up to higher I/O counts and finer pitches, experts said. Other WLP trends to watch in 2009 include high-power and high-accuracy precision devices, through-silicon vias (TSVs), fan-outs, and embedded flash.

SanDisk unveiled a portable digital music system based on memory cards preloaded with songs, signaling a shift in its strategy to compete against the iPod. The Sansa slotRadio player and companion line of slotRadio music cards were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Nanya Technology, Taiwan's No. 2 DRAM chip maker, said on Wednesday it plans to raise the contract price of its chips by 10% in January from the level in late December.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China's top contract chip maker, is discussing the possibility of selling a strategic stake in itself to Intel, sources familiar with the talks said on Tuesday. The possible alliance could help Intel expand its business in China, which it has described as its fastest-growing major market.

Japan's Sanyo Electric plans to cut up to 1,000 jobs to revamp its struggling businesses before being bought by Panasonic, a press report said Tuesday.

Hynix Semiconductor, the world's No. 2 maker of computer memory chips, is set to raise $249 million in a new share issue this month under a shareholder-led support package, an executive said on Tuesday.

Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor has a prototype low-cost notebook using ARM-designed chips is the latest evidence that the UK company could play a major part in the next wave of computing.

The palm-sized device in a larger 500GB capacity is on sale from various online retailers now for around £120.

Toshiba, a company best known for making laptops and consumer electronics, on Monday said that it will enter the solar-photovoltaics business. Toshiba's photovoltaics business will be part of the conglomerate's Transmission Distribution & Industrial Systems business, which makes equipment for natural-gas power plants.

A slowdown in technology node migrations at the major DRAM producers is adding to the expected capital expenditure cuts manufacturing as companies struggle to combat increasing losses and preserve cash, according to the latest report from DRAMeXchange. The spending cuts are a direct result of the combined DRAM industry losing approximately US$8 billion in 2008.

Spansion, the Sunnyvale flash-memory maker, chose to borrow US$74.8 million of the US$85 million available to it under an agreement with UBS, the Swiss investment banker that holds auction-rate securities that were worth US$121.9 million when Spansion first bought them. The investment has a current estimated market value of US$107.4 million, according to a filing Spansion made Monday.

Samsung Electronics denied a report saying it may cut its 2009 investment in semiconductors by more than half from last year amid a lingering downturn. "At this point, we have not made any decisions on our investment plan, and even if we had a plan it would be contingent on different economic scenarios that will be possible during this year," Chu-Woo-sik, Samsung's executive vice president of investor relations, told Reuters.

Freescale on Monday is expected to announce a new processor for netbooks that may challenge chip maker Intel on price in the low-cost computing space. The company's i.MX515 processor will run on netbooks, low-cost laptops that are designed to perform basic computing functions like accessing the Internet and running productivity applications.

Taipei-based DRAMeXchange has lowered its outlook for 2009 NAND Flash bit growth from 108.2% to 81%. The market intelligence company cites weakened demand for flash memory as the source, stemming from a decrease in forecast demand for flash memory-based consumer devices in 2009.

Shares of chip makers and companies serving the sector suffered during the year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Sector index, which is comprised of chip companies as well as manufacturers of chip-making equipment, fell by nearly half in 2008. The index closed Tuesday's trading session at 211.26, compared with 408.04 at the end of 2007.

Tejas Silicon Holdings (UK) has completed the acquisition of the Atmel wafer fabrication operation in Heilbronn, Germany. The sale follows a leasing agreement announced in September and its completion on December 31 has enabled Atmel to achieve its goal of reducing the number of its manufacturing facilities from five to two in 2008.

Mainstream SSD drives tend to be limited to 80 GB or less for affordability. There are drives that have larger capacities, but the cost is significantly higher than a similar HDD, which is what is keeping SSD drives out of the hands of many at this point. Despite this, capacities are ramping up fast!

Commodities, until six months ago the darling of investors and an out-performing asset class, sealed their worst year on record with accelerating losses in the fourth quarter of the year, data showed on Thursday. "At the moment, confidence in the commodity market is short, definitely short. That confidence would start to be restored when we start to see a rebound in equity markets again..."