Intel wants to avoid the cyclical, market share game in the NAND flash chip sector against the likes of Samsung, Hynix and Toshiba. But Intel dropped hints it wants to unseat Samsung as the No. 1 player in SSDs.

Samsung Electronics has overtaken Hewlett-Packard as the world's biggest technology company by sales, a sign of how strongly some South Korean companies have bounced back from the economic downturn.

"The iPad appears to be a swelled-up version of the iPod Touch. ... It is expected to become a niche market," an analyst at Hana Daetoo Securities told The Korea Herald.

Apple's iPad device may significantly increase demand for components such as touch screens and memory chips, especially if it succeeds in creating a new product category and spawning competitors, according to industry analysts.

Currently Seagate makes a Pulsar SSD with a 3Gbit/s SATA interface. It fits in a 2.5-inch HDD slot in a disk drive enclosure. A PCIe-connected SSD fits into a server as a plug-in flash card and that's where LSI comes in.

Canon has reported a more than fivefold jump in profits for the final three months of 2009 after sales of digital cameras grew strongly.

Since the new device apparently will rely heavily on NAND flash for its computing and storage needs, and because the most recent products Apple has produced have tended to sell very well, the NAND flash industry may be looking at a major stabilizing factor.

Abu Dhabi's ATIC, which helped create Globalfoundries when AMD spun off its manufacturing business, is looking to assume full control of the company.

Rambus, which designs memory chips, said that an administrative judge for the US International Trade Commission has ruled that graphics chip maker Nvidia has violated three of its patents.

The European Union has approved Oracle's US$7.4 billion takeover of fellow computer firm Sun Microsystems. Oracle said it now expected to complete the deal shortly.

China says its dispute with US search giant Google should not be linked to Beijing's relations with Washington.

"We could have done a lot more business," said AMD CEO Dirk Meyer. "We are seeing progress both in the delivery of wafers and the underlying yields. But we are constrained today."

Both Seagate and rival Western Digital have seen demand for disk drives return even as supplies of the devices remain low, pushing up profits.

Hard disk drive maker Western Digital has posted a sharp increase in its fiscal second-quarter profit as sales grew amid a recovery in the technology sector and the company trimmed costs.