SanDisk said it is still "open" to a Samsung buyout offer and hinted at more restructuring to come, as the largest supplier of retail flash memory cards reported a third-quarter 2008 net loss of US$155 million on Monday. The loss was significantly worse than the net income of US$85 million reported in the third quarter of 2007. SanDisk and other flash memory chip suppliers have been hit by a steep price decline in flash.

Researchers have found a simple way to make high-performance electronic circuits from organic semiconductors. The advance, reported in this week's Nature, brings us one step closer to low-cost, bendable plastic electronics.

A related supporting platform will also be developed, supporting HSUPA/HSDPA/W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE (2G) mobile telephony standards. Development of the platform is targeted for completion by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 (January–March 2010). The new G4 will be fabricated with 45nm process technology and will provide enhanced functionality and improved performance for applications handling HD video and 3-D graphics.

Last year, the ITC ruled that certain new models of 3G wireless handsets with Qualcomm chipsets could not be imported because they infringed on a Broadcom patent. An appellate court stayed the ban in September, pending appeal. On Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the ITC's ruling about the patent's validity. However, it reversed the import ban because Broadcom filed a complaint only against Qualcomm. The ITC could not ban products made by "downstream manufacturers."

..The company, whose customers include Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, sold 37 lithography machines in the third quarter at an average price of 16.0 million ($22.0 million), and received 31 new bookings. ASML forecast that it would sell 26 machines in the next quarter, which, along with the expected selling price of those units, was lower than Pacific Crest Securities analyst Weston Twigg had expected.

Elpida, which trails Samsung and Hynix, said it would allocate half of the funds raised by the one-year, zero-coupon bond issue to produce smaller versions of existing chips at its factory in Hiroshima, western Japan. The other half of the funds will be used on new equipment to make 50nm chips with Taiwan partner PSC to stay competitive, an Elpida spokesman said. Using 50nm circuits would allow Elpida to make even tinier chips that would halve the cost of making a semiconductopr compared with the company's existing chips.

SanDisk may have just concluded a multibillion-dollar patent licensing lawsuit with Samsung which could determine the future of both SanDisk and the flash industry at large. As SanDisk considers a US$5.8 billion takeover offer by the flash giant, private arbitration has given Sandisk rights to a technology that may well hold the future of flash memory.

Broadcom claims Qualcomm has double-dipped on its patents by charging a fee for the use of its technology and another fee for its use in combination with another product. It's a practice that is referred to as patent exhaustion. The lawsuit "further asserts that these practices constitute patent misuse that has brought Qualcomm a financial windfall and brought harm to the industry and consumers," Broadcom said in a statement. In addition to licensing its technology, Qualcomm also makes chips for phones using the same IP.

The Supreme Court has refused to consider appeals from Samsung Electronics in a case against Rambus, a memory design and patent licensing company, closing a saga that began in 2005 over alleged patent infringement.

confidence, and cloudy visibility in the second half of the year have forced Gartner to lower its forecast for 2008 revenue growth in Asia/Pacific's semiconductor market. The research company in its Semiconductor DQ Monday Report yesterday decreased its estimate for the region from 6.4% to 5.2% growth on an annual basis.

Japan's Toshiba is in talks to buy US chip maker Spansion, two industry sources said, in the latest sign of pressure for consolidation in the struggling memory sector. However, Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said his company was not in talks to buy Spansion, and was also not considering such a move.

AMD plans to announce Tuesday that it will split into two companies - one focused on designing microprocessors and the other on manufacturing them. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms will inject at least US$6 billion into the two firms, mostly to finance a new chip factory that AMD planned to build near Albany, NY, and to upgrade one of the company's existing plants in Dresden, Germany.

...PV support is shaky in the European Union. In Spain, a new cap on solar electric installations of 300 MWp in 2009 could maroon more than a gigawatt worth of product. Other than Germany, which has implemented market controls, there's nowhere else for these stranded megawatts to go. In the United States, incentives remain weak in what is essentially a one-state market: California. However, even there, government incentives are necessary to fuel the willingness to deploy what remains a costly technology.

Our plan is to directly take legal action against the Japanese government, said Park Hyun, a Hynix spokesman. Park, however, didn't give the exact timing of the action but added that it wouldn't be this month. Hynix's challenge against Tokyo came following the US' decision not to renew punitive tariffs on its semiconductors. The European Union dropped tariffs on Hynix in April this year.