Like all chip makers, Renesas (Tokyo) faces the possible impact of the current economic crisis and IC slowdown. Renesas has not publically lowered its sales and profit forecasts for fiscal 2008. But clearly, the current economic crisis in the United States and elsewhere could have a "severe effect" on the semiconductor industry, warned Katsuhiro Tsukamoto, president and chief operating officer at Renesas. "Consumer demand will drop," Tsukamoto told EE Times in an interview. Worldwide capital spending "will slow down."

Leading vendors are diversifying their product lines, driving down operating costs and improving production efficiencies to mitigate ongoing problems in the mainstream DRAM industry. Manufacturers are putting renewed priority on developing more power-efficient parts. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers continue to push the process envelope to higher densities.

Alvarion's Mobile WiMAX 4Motion solution will be used by Altitude to extend its coverage and provide voice and data services at 3.5 GHz to corporate, ISP and residential users in the Jura and Deux Sevres districts. The rollout of this commercial network is already underway, with plans to be completed in early 2009.

Foxconn's channel division has been given an ultimatum, turn profitable before the end of second-quarter 20Q2'09 or that's it. That is not a lot of time for Foxconn Channel to sort things out, especially as the division has been plagued by production delays and a whole host of other issues. Hopefully the current restructuring will help improve things.

Backed by a strong investor, Advanced Micro Devices is expected to expand its production lines and next foundry service providers such as Fab 36 and Fab 38 in Dresden, Germany. During a congress in Munich, Udo Nothelfer, VP, manufacturing and technology, for AMD's Fab 36, gave details on the company's strategy and road map. "AMD's expansion plans are based on the presumption that the trend in the IC industry toward fab-lite and fabless business models will create added demand for foundry services," said Nothelfer.

SanDisk has released details of its new flash management technology, ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System) which has the potential to extend endurance and accelerate SSD random write speeds by as much as 100 times compared with existing systems.

Struggling chip maker AMD said Wednesday it is cutting 500 workers, or 3% of its global staff, to help the company return to profitability. The cuts are AMD's second big round of layoffs this year.

Nvidia has (according to sources) infringed a patent regarding PCI prefetch held by OPTi and although OPTi no longer makes PC chips, they now license intellectual property. Nvidia didn't come to agreeable terms with OPTi and has to remove the PCI prefetch feature from its chipsets.

He said that the 49 percent debt-to-equity ratio in the third quarter was an anomaly because of the acquisition of Lite-On Technology Corp (光寶科技) last month, and that by year end he expects the ratio to drop to between 17-25%. On the issue of access to capital, Henry Lin assured analysts that Wistron is still a first-tier customer to many commercial banks, despite increased funding costs.