ARM, the UK designer of chips that help power Apple's iPhone, said first-quarter sales rose 26% on booming demand for smartphones and tablet computers.

Smartphones and tablets will be the first devices to use ARM's upcoming Cortex-A15 processor, and will be available starting late 2012 or early 2013, said James Bruce, the US mobile segment manager at ARM.

Analysts at Barclays and UBS had speculated that shutdowns at Mitsubishi Gas would deprive some chipmakers of a chemical resin used to package their products, causing supply disruptions.

"Shares of MIPS are selling off today because ARM announced a subscription license agreement with Broadcom," said Gary Mobley, an analyst with The Benchmark Company, in a report. "Because of Broadcom's heavy use of MIPS cores, Broadcom is MIPS' largest customer. We estimate Broadcom's royalties paid to MIPS represent 35% of MIPS' royalty revenue, or 15% of total revenue."

Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith reiterated that the chip giant will be a strong player in the fast-growing mobile device market despite early struggles. Intel, which provides microprocessors that run about 80% of the world's computers, has been slow to gain traction in the smartphone and tablet markets. Products based on ARM Holdings PLC (ARMH) architecture have dominated the industry, with the chips seen as much more power efficient than Intel processors.

"In 2010 there was a big bounce in the semiconductor market marking a recovery year which has seen the industry overall grow about 15%," said Tim Score, ARM's CFO. "ARM grew about 30%, and this year we expect the industry to grow about 5% to 8%, and that we will grow faster."

Speculation ARM could become a takeover target is misguided and ignores the importance of the chip designer staying independent, ARM's president said.

Warren East, chief executive of ARM, said the market for tablet PCs could grow to as much as 60m unit sales in 2011 as he brushed aside concerns that Intel would pose a major competitive threat to the UK chip company in the fast-growing market.

Intel, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics will join hands to develop technologies that could more than halve semiconductor line widths to nearly 10 nanometers by 2016, the Nikkei daily reported.

IBM has announced details of what it claims is the world's fastest computer chip - the microprocessor in a new version of the IBM mainframe that begins shipping to customers on September 10.

ARM, the UK's largest technology company by market value, declined to raise its full-year 2010 outlook in spite of beating market expectations with its first-half results.

"With closer access to the Arm technology we will be able to enhance our R&D activities for ARM-based products," said KD Hallman, general manager, Microsoft.

ARM is more valuable as a standalone company and a buyer would be wasting money, said company CEO Warren East. The chip designer rose last week to an eight-year high on takeover talk.

ARM CEO Warren East said the company was planning to hire about 100 more engineers in 2010 - the first headcount additions for four years - mainly to work on high-end processors that are used in smartphones and netbooks.

Currently, Apple pays royalties for ARM's chip designs used in its products. If the company acquired ARM, it could conceivably raise licensing costs to rivals or even take ARM designs off the market.

"Although netbooks are small today - maybe 10% of the PC market at most - we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market...," according to company CEO Warren East.

Standard lithography uses a set of masks to create a pattern of structures in a photoresist that's exposed to ultraviolet light. The Taiwan team's process eliminates both the masks and the photoresist, relying instead on a metallorganic gas, an organic molecule studded with atoms of platinum.

While the headlines on Mosaid Technologies are about the patent-infringement suit it launched against IBM, the case won't be resolved for years. Of more pressing concern is whether Mosaid can renew its patent-license agreement with Samsung Electronics.

Nokia's strategic relationship with Intel, announced last month, may be very forward-looking and not about to worry any incumbent wireless chipset suppliers, but it is nonetheless threatening to Europe's local hero, ARM Holdings.

...In the long run, they say, there will be only three viable entities, at least at the leading edge of chipmaking: Samsung in memory chips, Intel in microprocessors and TSMC in foundries. The rest will be "nationalistic" ventures in need of regular government bail-outs.

Much to the chagrin of the largest high-tech companies whose products have served as the foundation for computing for the past 30 years, the microprocessor is breaking free of the chains that bind it. ARM is a microprocessor manufacturer that is taking advantage of advancing technology's steady destruction of those chains forged by the likes of AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.

The Cambridge-based company was already eight years old when on Jan. 6 1999 EE Times reported ARM's own prediction that the company would have 70 percent of the market for processors in the mobile phone handset business. This was a statistic that came to define ARM's early success.

A growing percentage of cell phones, PDAs, and high-speed microprocessors are assembled with flip chip technology today. If the reliability and cost reduction decades can be shortened to 3-5 years each, then high-volume production using TSVs could happen in 6-10 years, i.e., 2015-2020. If not, then high volume production will start after 2020.