Toshiba is well within its rights to sell its memory operations, the Japanese conglomerate has told business partner Western Digital in response to efforts by the hard-drive supplier to block the auction, it was learned Tuesday.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sees the US semiconductor industry as still dominant globally but said he is worried that it will be threatened by China's planned investment binge to build up its own chipmaking industry.

Toshiba's business partners are preparing for a scenario in which the company seeks to reorganize under Japanese bankruptcy laws, with consequences for the global nuclear-power and electronics industries.

Qualcomm has introduced two new mobile platforms, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630, both designed to support a leap in performance enabling advanced photography and enhanced gaming, in addition to long battery life and fast LTE speeds.

Robert Bosch has won orders from Apple to supply the next iPhone with some of its motion sensors, according to a person familiar with the deal, a potential blow to InvenSense, currently the main supplier of those smartphone components.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DoE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have claimed a world record, saying they have patterned devices with feature sizes as small as 1nm. The research team hopes to use the same technique to create and impart to silicon new properties never before observed.

In 2016, NXP in the Netherlands overtook Renesas Electronics in Japan as the world's largest microcontroller supplier with MCU revenues climbing 116% following its US$11.6 billion purchase of US-based Freescale Semiconductor in December 2015.

Apple has stopped paying its iPhone manufacturers for royalties owed to Qualcomm for the first quarter, Qualcomm said on Friday. Apple sued Qualcomm in January, saying that the royalties were excessive, and will now be withholding payments until the legal battle is resolved.

Samsung Electronics is planning to invest in a new DRAM lab, according to Korean media reports. The move raises concerns of a capital spending race which could ruin profitability for makers of DRAM, a memory chip commonly used in smartphones.

Texas Instruments, which has one of the biggest customer lists in the semiconductor business, gave an outlook suggesting demand remains strong for components across industries from cars to factory equipment.

Samsung Electronics' flourishing components business helped the South Korean technology giant notch up its highest quarterly profit in more than three years, as the company said that it would not adopt a holding company structure after a monthslong internal review.

The Mali-C71 is the first development to come out of ARM's 2016 acquisition of Apical, which gave ARM the capabilities in imaging and computer vision necessary to meet the automotive market's needs.

Toshiba has announced it will split up its four main businesses into separate wholly owned subsidiaries. The spinoffs will begin in July and 19,000 employees will be transferred to the new companies.

Group Chairman Zhao Weiguo told the Nikkei Asian Review that by 2020 his group will definitely close in on Qualcomm and MediaTek, the world's top two mobile chip providers. The group aims to be among the top five memory chip makers globally in a decade, according to Zhao.

Japan's Nikon on Monday said it has initiated legal action against ASML and Carl Zeiss, saying the Dutch and Germany companies used its lithography technology without its permission.

Toshiba temporarily canceled all meetings and decisions related to the sale of its memory chip business to address concerns raised by an industry partner, people familiar with the matter said.

Rambus revealed Monday (April 17) that the company, in collaboration with Microsoft researchers, has succeeded in prototyping cryogenic memory. The new technologies will be essential to data centers, "currently the fastest growing consumer of memory" in the industry, Craig Hampel, chief scientist at Rambus, told EE Times.

NXP will ship this year as many as five SoCs made in Samsung's 28nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process, including one that has been sampling for six months. Samsung is expected to announce its FD-SOI roadmap in May and is already working on RF and in-house embedded MRAM for it.

Taiwan's Foxconn has asked for SoftBank Group's cooperation in its bid for Toshiba Corp's prized memory chip unit, the Nikkei business daily reported on Friday.

Western Digital has warned Toshiba that the proposed sale of its memory business contravenes the terms of their flash foundry joint venture.

Follow the current and you see signs of other activity within the Apple supply chain core. Credit Suisse this morning warns that Synaptics may also be at risk as its biggest client moves component design in house.

It used to be that any burp, hiccup, earthquake, typhoon or tsunami in Asia drove Micron's stock price wild. Seemingly no longer true with bellicose moves on the Korean Peninsula.

A recent report out of Japan says three of tech's biggest and most prominent companies are interested in bidding on Toshiba's memory chip business. Can this be true?

Dialog Semiconductor's shares plunged the most in more than 16 years after an analyst warned that Apple probably will cut back on the use of the company's power-management chips.

Globalfoundries is offering early retirement packages to some longtime employees at its US semiconductor manufacturing plants, including East Fishkill, the company confirmed Wednesday.

A Chinese private equity firm has cut a deal to acquire Xcerra, a Massachusetts-based supplier of semiconductor and electronics test equipment, for $580 million, Xcerra said Monday (April 10).

A Japanese public-private consortium is being assembled to bid for a stake in Toshiba's newly spun-off memory unit in hopes of heading off potential outflows of technology and talent from the country, it was learned Friday.

Struggling Toshiba's planned semiconductor business sell-off has attracted bids of more than JPY2 trillion ($18.1 billion) from two foreign companies.

Toshiba has narrowed the number of bidders for its semiconductor business from about 10 interested parties to a smaller group that includes Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry and Korea's SK Hynix, according to people familiar with the matter.

IBM said it will offer the latest Nvidia GPU, the Tesla P100, in the IBM Cloud as it aims to grab artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high performance computing workloads.

The complaint specifically refers to Toshiba flash memory chips and products containing such chips-including memory cards, solid-state drives, wearable devices, digital camcorders, mobile devices, advanced audiovisual systems, car navigation systems, computers, servers, and other consumer electronic devices-as infringing products.

Samsung Electronics is expecting operating profits of KRW9.9 trillion ($8.8 billion) for the first quarter of 2017, its second-highest quarterly profit, thanks to strong performance from its chip business and despite the absence of the Galaxy Note 7.

"The biggest benefit I think is convenience," said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and CEO of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door by merely waving near it. "It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys."

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will adopt the world's first spray-type electromagnetic interference, or EMI shielding technology, for their respective chip production lines from June, according to industry sources.

Record earnings at Samsung Electronics' chip division are set to propel the tech giant's first-quarter profit to a three-and-a-half-year high, and the quarters ahead could be even better if its newest smartphone, Galaxy S8, is a success.

Imagination Technologies was forced to issue an announcement on Apple's intention to stop using its GPU tech in the next 15-24 months. With over 50% of Imagination Technologies' revenue coming from Apple alone, its share price understandably collapsed 70%.

Today brings a report from Credit Suisse's John Pitzer, who maintains a Neutral rating on Intel shares, and a $35 price target. He concedes Intel has shown it maintains its manufacturing lead. He's just not sure it will be enough to give the company the edge it needs.

The French utility company Engie said it was exercising "contractual rights" to sell its shares because NuGen was "facing some significant challenges."