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Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong has been freed from jail after a South Korean court suspended his five year jail term for bribing the country's ex-president. Seoul High Court upheld parts of the conviction, but used its discretion to release the executive.
BBC News
Google's Android phone has only one lens, but a technology called RAISR uses machine learning to help you zoom in better.
CNET
Leshi last week flagged that it expected a loss of 11.6 billion yuan for 2017 due to the ongoing financial crisis at its founder Jia Yueting's LeEco conglomerate.
Reuters
Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came out of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers.
TechCrunch
Samsung Electronics is launching a new chip for cars, tentatively called Exynos Auto, with aims to supply the chip first to Audi that has used chips mostly from Qualcomm, industry sources said on Feb. 5.
The Investor
Broadcom plans to unveil a new approximately $120 billion offer for Qualcomm on Monday, aiming to ratchet up pressure on its US semiconductor peer to engage in negotiations, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
Reuters
Walkie-talkie maker Motorola Solutions said on Thursday it would buy Canadian security camera maker Avigilon for C$1.2 billion ($978 million) cash.
Reuters
Samsung Electronics is expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a macroeconomic management agency under China's State Council, this week.
BusinessKorea
For several years, Apple has been steadily designing more and more of the chips powering its iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches.
Bloomberg
Samsung Electronics will differentiate itself from rivals in the saturated mobile market with the launch of a foldable OLED phone this year, the South Korean tech giant has said.
ZDNet
Ericsson reported larger than expected losses for the fourth quarter on Wednesday and said it expected the Chinese market to continue to decline, dampening hopes of any short-term rebound for the struggling mobile equipment maker.
Reuters
Sharp swung to a JPY55.3 billion (US$506 million) net profit for the nine months ended in December 2017, as strong sales of tablet screens drove a recovery by LCD operations. The Japanese electronics maker, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, or Foxconn, had logged a JPY41.1 billion net loss in the year-earlier period.
Nikkei Asian Review
NEC will offer early retirement packages for 3,000 of the 80,000 people employed in Japan by group companies next fiscal year, as it turns to restructuring yet again to help revive stagnant earnings in a fiercely competitive market.
Nikkei Asian Review
China will fill 15% of its semiconductor needs in 2020 and perhaps 20% in 2022. That's significant growth, but far from the targets of 40% in 2020 and 70% in 2022 that the China government has set.
EE Times
The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed older iPhone models, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg
The new products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of data across a broad spectrum of Big Data applications such as analytics and distributed file systems.
Company release
Japanese chip vendor Renesas Electronics denied that it is in talks to acquire rival Maxim Integrated after reports about a possible deal sent Maxim's stock price skyrocketing.
EE Times
Apple will halve its production target for the iPhone X in the three-month period from January from the figure of over 40 million units envisaged at the time of its release in November.
Nikkei Asian Review
A plan for a billion-dollar fab in Guangzhou, China, aims to pool investments from fabless companies, creating a built-in customer base. It is the latest addition to a growing list of projects as the country tries to build up its semiconductor sector.
EE Times
LG Display will supply flexible organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) to Sony. They broadened the scope of cooperation from large OLED TVs to smartphones.
BusinessKorea
Western Digital gave strong profit forecasts for the current quarter and the full year on Thursday and said the flash memory market would grow faster this year, easing investor jitters that the surging demand for memory chips was fading.
Reuters
Texas Instruments on Tuesday posted the slowest revenue growth in four quarters on softer demand for its chips used in communications equipment, disappointing investors who expected sales for automotive chips to drive strong results.
Reuters
Micro semi, the largest US commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment, is exploring its options, including a possible sale, after it received a takeover approach, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
Reuters
Company release
Rumors have started popping up online suggesting that Meizu will no longer release MediaTek-powered smartphones, as the company is focusing more on Exynos and Snapdragon-powered gadgets.
AndroidHeadlines
Sony is also confirmed to be hosting its keynote on February 26, and chances are that the company will announce the Xperia XZ and Xperia XZ Pro flagship handsets during that press conference.
AndroidHeadlines
The head of China's second-biggest e-commerce company, JD.com Inc, accused the United States on Wednesday of practising "serious" protectionism against Chinese firms and said this would ultimately backfire on the world's largest economy.
Nikkei Asian Review
The European Commision (EC), the EU's legislative and regulatory arm, said its investigation, which lasted for more than two years, concluded that Qualcomm paid Apple billions of dollars to keep it from buying LTE baseband chips from Qualcomm's rivals, violating EU antitrust rules.
EE Times
In 2017, about two dozen acquisition agreements were reached for semiconductor companies, business units, product lines, and related assets with a combined value of $27.7 billion compared to the record-high $107.3 billion set in 2015 and the $99.8 billion total in 2016.
IC Insights
HomePod, the innovative wireless speaker from Apple, arrives in stores beginning Friday, February 9 and is available to order online this Friday, January 26 in the US, UK and Australia. HomePod will arrive in France and Germany this spring.
Company release
Google today unveiled its experimental effort to integrate augmented reality features into the mobile and desktop web using its Chrome browser. That way, web designers, media organizations, and other creative professionals could create virtual 3D objects, embed them into websites for viewing on desktop, and make them downloadable on mobile so users could place those objects into their real world surroundings.
The Verge
Company release
The world is rapidly "running out of computing capacity," the head of tech giant Microsoft has warned. Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that superfast quantum computers are needed to solve some of the most difficult problems.
BBC News
Nearly three years after Tokyo Electron's planned merger with Applied Materials collapsed over objections from US anti-trust regulators, the Japanese company finds itself in a surprising position: healthier profit margins.
Nikkei Asian Review
Micron has announced with Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure.
Company release
The US has approved controversial tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels. The move is in line with President Trump's "America First" trade policy, which aims to protect local manufacturers from foreign competition. Chinese solar panels makers and washing machine producers in South Korea will be most heavily affected.
BBC News
After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.
ExtremeTech
The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.
EE Times
The South Korean chip industry is tightening its monitoring of increasing protectionist moves by China and the US as they are faced with probes and suspicions of price collision.
Korea Herald
Toshiba is considering an IPO of its prized memory chip business if an agreed $18 billion sale to a Bain Capital-led consortium fails to gain antitrust approval by the end of March, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Reuters UK
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