In an effort to increase its competitiveness in the North American consumer market, Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo: 6502) is selling its Chihuahua, Mexico-based LCD production facilities to PC manufacturer Compal Electronics Inc. The announcement, made in a press release today, comes on the heels of market reports that LCD TV demand in North America is "alarmingly" weak, despite increasing prices for LCD panels worldwide.

Toshiba and SanDisk on July 12 celebrated the opening of Fab 5, the third 300mm wafer NAND fabrication facility at Toshiba's Yokkaichi Operations in Mie Prefecture, Japan.

Toshiba President Norio Sasaki also said the company is gaining on South Korea's Samsung Electronics in terms of flash memory global market share, though warned that the rivalry could undercut prices.

Toshiba has announced that it will establish two new technology development centers for hard disk drives (HDD). The "HDD Advanced Technology Center" will seek to accelerate development of higher density technology and the "HDD Manufacturing Technology Center" will develop enhanced manufacturing capabilities. Both will open on July 16th.

Hitachi Ltd is in talks with Toshiba and Sony about joining the merger of their liquid-crystal display (LCD) units, a move that would create the world's largest maker of small panels, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

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.

Toshiba has developed noise reduction technology that reduces jitter in radio-frequency signals, cutting phase noise by up to 90%. This breakthrough opens the way for a further migration to high-speed wireless communication chips for wireless LAN and WiMAX.

Japan is seeking to protect its lead in the production of touchscreen displays used in smartphones and tablet computers with a plan to merge operations owned by Sony and Toshiba into a new company that would be majority-owned by the government.

The acquisition, valued at US$2.3 billion including net debt, will substantially enhance the scope of Toshiba's Smart Grid and Smart Community businesses and position the company as a global competitor with world-class capabilities.

Could future iPhones sport 720p displays? If you connect the dots in a news release from Toshiba, possibly.

Toshiba is near an agreement to buy Landis+Gyr, a Swiss electronic-metering company, for more than US$2 billion, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

Toshiba has said it returned to the black for the year to March 2011, but warned the outlook remains uncertain due to the impact of the massive quake and tsunami in Japan.

South Korea's LG Electronics has diversified chip suppliers for home appliance products to Hynix Semiconductor and Panasonic away from Toshiba after Japan's devastating earthquake last month.

Consumer electronics giant Sony, chipmakers Elpida Memory and Renesas, and electronics firms Panasonic and Toshiba have all said that production at some plants in northern Japan had been halted again due to power cuts triggered by a major aftershock that shook the region on April 7.

Production was suspended at the plant in Iwate Prefecture after suffering damage in the March 11 earthquake. The plant makes microcontrollers and large scale integration chips.

Iwate Toshiba Electronics will start to ramp-up production lines from March 28. However, Toshiba Mobile Display (Saitama Pref.), a wholly-owned subsidiary and manufacturer of mid- and small-sized LCD displays, expects to take about a month to secure recovery of its manufacturing line. Toshiba has started to supply some products alternatively from the Ishikawa Works, the company's another production facility located in Ishikawa Pref..

Rambus has renewed its patent license agreement with Toshiba. This five year agreement covers Toshiba's products with DRAM memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, and other DRAM devices. Rambus will receive royalty payments based on the shipment of these memory controllers.

Toshiba said it will cooperate with Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) request to cut electricity consumption by operating only those of its businesses related to provision of essential services required for social and economic activities.

Apple's next-generation iPad contains chips made by Toshiba, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, according to an initial tear-down report by gadget-repair site iFixit. Toshiba supplied the device's storage chips, iFixit said, while Broadcom made the chips used for wireless Internet access. TI chips were used to control the iPad's touchscreen.

The two Toshiba-SanDisk JV semiconductor manufacturing plants, Fab 3 and Fab 4, were down for a short period of time due to the earthquake and were back up and operational as of Friday morning, Pacific Time. SanDisk's current assessment is that there has been minimal immediate impact on wafer output due to the earthquake.

Japan's biggest-ever earthquake halted production briefly at Toshiba's chip plants on Friday and could delay crucial shipments. Toshiba and SanDisk share cutting-edge facilities in Yokkaichi, where they make NAND chips increasingly in demand by Apple and other mobile device makers.

Toshiba has developed a new flip-flop circuit using 40nm CMOS process that the company claims will reduce power consumption in mobile equipment. Measured data verifies that the power dissipation of the new flip-flop is up to 77% less than that of a conventional flip-flop and that it achieves a 24% reduction in total power consumption when applied to a wireless LAN chip.

The profit gain was largely due to "a significantly improved performance in electronic devices, driven mainly by the return to profit of the LCD business and demand expansion in NAND flash memories," Toshiba said in a statement.

Toshiba is hammering out a deal to outsource fabrication of advanced system chips to Globalfoundries, the Nikkei business daily reported, citing company sources.

"It'll come out in the spring of 2011 and the price, we haven't decided yet," said Chris Casper, a group manager at Toshiba's digital products division.

Toshiba announced it has acquired Fujitsu's shareholding in Toshiba Storage Device and turned the JV its wholly-owned subsidiary. Toshiba and Fujitsu merged their HDD businesses in October 2009.

Sony has announced plans to invest approximately 100 billion yen (US$1.2 billion) over the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012, to double its production capacity for CCD and CMOS image sensors. The investment plan includes the transfer of a plant from Toshiba.

As part of the strategy for transforming the system LSI business and securing an asset light business model, Toshiba has signed a MoU with Sony, expressing the intent to dissolve Nagasaki Semiconductor Manufacturing (NSM) and to transfer 300mm wafer fabrication lines there from Toshiba to Sony.

Toshiba will outsource fabrication of system chips to South Korea's Samsung Electronics, freeing up resources for its memory chip operations, the Nikkei business daily has reported.