Rubicon Technology is beginning volume production of 6-inch and 8-inch sapphire wafers at its state-of-the-art facility in Penang, Malasia, while GT Solar is investing $27 million to triple its sapphire production capacity in Salem, Mass.

Suntech Power's Just-Roof building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) module has been approved by French certification body CEIAB (Comit矇 d'Evaluation de l'Int矇gration au B璽ti). CEIAB is France's official evaluation committee for all BIPV products, and its endorsement sees Just Roof gain eligibility for the country's highest available feed-in-tariff.

Ontario's Minister of Energy, Brad Duguid, was on site as Eclipsall Energy opened the doors of its solar PV panel manufacturing facility in Toronto, Canada. Full production is expected to occur later this summer at the 120,000 square foot facility, which accommodates all of Eclipsall's operations and has room for expansion.

Two China Sunergy subsidiaries are investing RMB1.8 billion (US$277 million) in a new 1GW solar cell manufacturing facility in Yangzhou, China. The joint venture will concentrate on the production of China Sunergy's newly-developed Quasar cells, with the first 500MW batch set to be delivered in the first half of 2012.

3M has announced the opening of the company's application laboratory in Yangmei, Taiwan, for 200mm and 300mm temporary wafer bonding. The addition expands 3M's existing wafer support applications labs in Japan and the US to meet customer demand.

It was "probably inevitable" that highly indebted economies would be given a way to quit the single currency, said financier George Soros.

LDK Solar Co., Ltd., a leading vertically integrated manufacturer of photovoltaic products, today announced that its Board of Directors approved a share buyback program that authorizes LDK Solar to repurchase up to US$110 million of its American Depository Shares ("ADSs") in the open market or through privately negotiated transactions. The program does not obligate LDK Solar to acquire any particular amount of its ADSs and may be modified or suspended at any time at the sole discretion of LDK Solar.

Soaring silver prices are hampering the solar industry's ability to compete with fossil fuels.

Britain's biggest array of solar panels has begun generating in Oxfordshire. The first large ground system to feed into the national grid will benefit from the tariff scheme paying a premium for supplying clean electricity.

The government also added that it is in the process of developing a policy to give preference to domestically-produced electronics goods in purchases by the government and government-linked projects.

Micron executives' comments about limited visibility of consumer PC demand and higher-than-ideal inventories of DRAM chips sparked a Friday sell-off in stocks linked to personal computers.

Micron Technology has announced net profits for the quarter ended June 2 were US$75 million, down from the US$939 million posted a year ago.

Nokia said the staff reductions will happen in phases until the end of 2012 and all the employees concerned can remain with the company until the end of 2011. Nokia previously said it plans to reduce its Finnish workforce by 1,400 people.

Nokia has completed a deal to outsource Symbian software development to Accenture, including the transfer of 2,800 workers to the global management-consulting firm.

When you're shopping for an HDTV, there are plenty of factors to consider. Chief among them is the type of display. While boxy, bulky CRTs are long dead and mammoth rear-projection HDTVs are all but extinct, the HDTV market currently offers three distinct choices in display technologies: plasma, traditional CCFL-backlit LCD, and LED-backlit LCD. For years, the question of which technology reigned supreme has remained unanswered.

Solar is one of the power sources the government of the world's third-largest economy is focusing on after the March earthquake and tsunami shattered Tokyo's nuclear-dependent energy policy.

"Common sense suggests that allegations of copying are necessarily directed at Apple's existing products, to which Samsung has access and could potentially mimic," said US District Court Judge Lucy Koh, "and not at Apple's unreleased, inaccessible, next-generation products."

Taiwan has lifted a decades-old ban on travel to the island by individual Chinese tourists, saying visitors would act as "peace ambassadors" for the former arch foe. The first batch of independent mainland tourists, from Beijing, Shanghai and the city of Xiamen on the southeast coast, will arrive next Tuesday (June 28).

Imagination Technologies, which designs microchips used in Apple's iPad and iPhone, has doubled its forecast for chip shipments. By 2016, the company expects more than 1bn will be shipped a year, up from a previous forecast of 500m.

Toshiba has announced that it will realign its storage products businesses in a unified organization by merging its Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company in a new in-house company on July 1.