Aquest Systems confirmed Thursday that on July 9 it sent Asyst Technologies an offer to buy the chip manufacturing equipment maker for US$6.50 per share in cash. Privately held Aquest, which is based in Sunnyvale, CA is a developer of automation technologies for the semiconductor industry.

Numbers concerning counterfeiting vary from source to source, as do the suggested ways to defend the electronics supply chain against these fake components. In late 2007, the US Patent and Trademark Office estimated that counterfeiting and piracy drain about US$250 billion out of the US economy each year along with some 750,000 jobs...

New solutions such as ultra-thin top silicon and ultra-thin Buried OXide (BOX) give device architects and designers complete flexibility in their choice of substrates for partially depleted (PD) and fully-depleted (FD) devices, including multi-gate transistor architectures (FinFET, Trigate). The advanced substrates support applications and architectures on the industry's sub-45 nm roadmap (and)...to make strategic choices for 32 nm and beyond, Soitec customers now have a full range of options at their disposal...

...In tests with TI the CC2591 has boosted outdoor range for a Zigbee radio as much as ten-fold to 1.5 miles. The chip integrates a group of mainly passive components including a power amplifier, low-noise amplifier, balun, switches, inductors and RF-matching devices.

The money will be split between three projects related to chip nanotechnologies, IBM said. They are updating its manufacturing plant in East Fishkill, New York; expanding its operations at the University of Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, a creating a new center for research into chip packaging at a location to be determined in Upstate New York. IBM didn't say how much money was going to each.

Semiconductor-based lighting could cut the energy used by lighting in half, says the U.S. Department of Energy. Because lighting accounts for about one-fifth of all electricity used in the United States, that could add up to some US$98B in energy savings by 2020. DOE figures just replacing the country's 60W bulbs with 10W LEDs would save enough electricity to power all of Las Vegas for a year – twice. Indeed, the government is so keen on the idea it is offering up to US$20M in prize money to developers of viable commercial fixtures.

MEC and JSR Corporation have collaborated on using only one etch step to reduce the cost of double patterning. 32nm lines and spaces were printed with a double exposure/single etch process, effectively freezing the resist after the first exposure. The freezing of the resist after the first exposure prevents the resist from expanding or shrinking, maintaining good CD control. When the second resist layer is added, the two do not interact.

Epson recently contracted chipmaker Hejian Technology to make its 0.15-micorn LCD drive ICs, making it the first contract buyer to order from the mainland Chinese chipmaker sub-0.18-micron chips. Banned by Taiwan authorities to export manufacturing processes better than 0.18-micron to the mainland, mainland`s factories run by TSMC and ProMOS Technologies are still unable to offer processes below 0.18-micron node. Industry watchers fear such ban will only help mainland`s homegrown chipmakers...

Shares of AMD fell to their lowest level in nearly 16 yearsafter the company disclosed that it will take US$948 million in charges against earnings when it reports its second-quarter financial performance next week...The size of the writedown was a surprise to investors, who sent the share price down 2.4% to close at US$4.84 a share, the lowest price since August 1992.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way to develop 25nm chip structures with a common lithography process, indicating that chip manufacturers will be able to push out the adoption of an expensive Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography manufacturing process by another chip generation.

Japan's Tokyo Electron (TEL) said orders for its tools to make semiconductors and flat panel display equipment fell a quarterly 35% to a five-year low in April-June on weak demand from memory makers. But the world's No.2 chip equipment maker expects orders to pick up in the current quarter as makers of computer memory chips spend more on production lines to meet year-end demand for faster computers and mobile phones.