Trading company giant Mitsui & Co. plans to build huge solar power plants in the Tohoku region to help the region recover from the March 11 disaster by easing its power shortages, it was learned Wednesday.

Hyundai Heavy has announced it was dropping plans for a takeover of Hynix Semiconductor.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have developed a technique for pushing the resolution of high-speed e-beam lithography to write patterns for chips as small as 9-nanometers across, much smaller than previously thought possible.

Solar and LED equipment maker GT Solar International Inc said it received orders worth $81.7 million for polysilicon production equipment from two new Asian customers, sending its shares to their lifetime high.

Leading LED lighting manufacturers have announced large price drops for the next-gen tech, meaning we could all be using far less energy in a few years.

With a 5-year goal of manufacturing nitride-based LEDs on large-diameter silicon substrates, Siltronic has joined IMEC's gallium-nitride-on-silicon program.

The president of the Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp. said Monday it will localize more of its solar panel production outside the country, as the strong yen makes exports too expensive while fast-growing Chinese makers create a global inventory glut.

Renewable sources in the U.S. are starting to produce enough energy to rival oil output, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Having 8 facilities within the Tokyo Electric Power Company and Tohoku Electric Power Co service areas, Kyocera has increased the size of the rooftop solar power system at its Tanagura manufacturing plant in Fukushima Prefecture, to meet energy reduction targets of 15%, due to the power consumption regulations dictated after the Fukushima nuclear power disaster.

QSolar Limited has introduced new high end solar panels with power outputs from 260W to 300W, designed specifically to address the large scale utility solar power plant applications. These panels produce 30% higher power output in comparison to the previous highly successful 230W range.

Chipmaker Wolfson Microelectronics has lost a quarter of its value after it warned on profits after customers sold fewer products than expected and delayed new launches. The company supplies chips for smartphones and tablets for the likes of Samsung, LG and Research in Motion (but crucially, not Apple).

Covent Garden Market is harvesting some dramatic energy savings thanks to a high-tech lighting system installed by two small London companies. Some merchants say the new LED lighting system has even reduced spoilage in their fruit and veggies.

Leader of the UK's opposition party, Ed Miliband, has challenged the government's decision to slash the country's photovoltaic feed-in tariffs (FITs) for systems over 50 kilowatts in size.

Tough market conditions have forced polysilicon producer Daqo to lower its second-quarter financial outlook for revenue and shipments. The move came after Daqo was hit hard by weak demand and declining prices for its products

After declining for two consecutive quarters, rapidly falling PV module price is a key factor in strong recovery of PV module shipments and re-establishing demand in 2H 11, as per the latest report from IMS Research.

Hackers apparently broke into the FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news early Monday and used it to announce - falsely - that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

Analysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable. At present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals.

Judge E. James Gildea found that Apple infringes US Patent No. 6,658,146 directed to systems and methods for compressing images and US Patent No. 6,683,978 directed to image data formats, both of which belong to S3 Graphics. In the industry, that technology is known as S3 Texture Compression (S3TC).

GE Lighting has announced plans to submit a 60W-equivalent LED lamp to the US Department of Energy (DOE) Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition targeted at solid-state-lighting (SSL) replacements for inefficient legacy lights. GE has collaborated with Cree using the latter's TrueWhite Technology in a design that the companies believe will meet the decidedly-challenging L-Prize requirements.

Four years ago, Congress had the not-so-bright idea to tell Americans what kind of light bulbs they could buy.

ARM has said that within 18 months its Mali GPU will be able to match the power of Sony's Playstation 3 or Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that Moore's Law was not the only way to achieve that.

A 2006 long-term wafer supply deal between Suntech and MEMC has been ?？utually terminated' at a cost to Suntech of approximately US$212 million. Suntech said that the decision to cancel the wafer supply deal was due to ?？apid changes in the market for silicon wafers.' Suntech also announced that it was stopping investment in CSG Solar's research and development operations, which focused on crystalline silicon thin-film technology. MEMC remains a wafer supplier to Suntech under other supply agreements.

Silver Age, a British Virgin Islands company, owns 100 percent of Solar Silicon Valley Electronic Science and Technology Co., Ltd., which is a China-based solar wafer manufacturer. It is, in turn, 70 percent owned by Jinglong Group, a company controlled by JA Solar's chairman, Baofang Jin.

"In the past, the semiconductor market tended to be weaker in the first half and stronger in the second half, but for this year, it is likely to remain flat throughout the latter half..."

Japan's Ricoh plans to acquire Pentax as part of a push to get into the digital single-lens reflex camera market, it said Friday.

IBM has solved two related problems with phase-change memory and now says the fast next-generation data-storage technology will be ready for use in 2016 in servers.

"It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a results of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, but despite widespread concerns about disruptions to the supply of critical components in the initial aftermath of the natural disaster, there has not been a dramatic impact on overall IT spending," said Richard Gordon, research VP at Gartner.

Samsung Electronics Co. said on Friday that it will fold its flat-panel display business back into its semiconductor business, uniting its component manufacturing operations just when the display business appears likely to be unprofitable for some time to come.