Japanese cabinet ministers will call on the government to ease rules on building geothermal, wind and hydraulic power plants to boost renewable energy use after the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the Nikkei business daily reported on Thursday.

Wal-Mart stores in the central Chinese city of Chongqing were cited for violations 20 times over five years before the latest incident that led to the closure of all the chain's stores in the city, a Chongqing official said on Wednesday.

The US economy plodded on with "modest" growth in September the Federal Reserve reported on Wednesday, describing restrained hiring and a still-weak housing market

A group of U.S. solar-panel makers Wednesday called on the federal government to punish Chinese rivals with extra duties for allegedly dumping their products on the U.S. market.

A coalition of US solar panel manufacturers asked on Wednesday for retaliatory tariffs on imports of panels from China, the first such case filed in the renewable energy sector.

Germany's solar industry has endured a difficult year and the Federal Network Agency and transmission system operators (TSO) have responded accordingly by leaving the Renewable Energy Law (EEG) levy virtually unchanged at ??.3592 per kWh.

X-FAB Silicon Foundries and Senodia Technologies (Shanghai) announced they have concluded development and are ramping production of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes for high-volume consumer applications.

Shares of both LED lighting company Cree and LED equipment maker Veeco Instruments are trading lower on growing concerns about pricing and over-capacity in the LED lighting sector. Both companies were the subject of bearish commentary from the Street this morning.

Viking Technology has launched the ArxCis-NVTM DRAM memory module, which the company said can automatically detect I/O interrupts and back up data to NAND flash prior to an outage.

Reports that Apple would ditch Samsung and look instead to TSMC for the Apple A6 processor expected to feature in the next-gen iPad 3 and iPhone 5 are premature, a Samsung exec has insisted, claiming that the two companies will continue to collaborate on chipset design and manufacture.

Infineon Technologies said it expects increasing caution in its industrial and multi-market sectors as well as in its chip card and security end markets to result in a mid-to-high single digit revenue decline in the next quarter.

TI's authorized semiconductor distributors include Arrow, Avnet, WPG, WT Microelectronics, and so on.

The Japanese semiconductor industry, which has been in decline for more than 20 years, needs to select key technology areas and refocus to rise again, Junshi Yamaguchi, former chairman of Renesas Electronics, told the International Electronics Forum being organized here.

SMSC has announced that Samsung Electronics has licensed its patented Inter-Chip Connectivity (ICC) technology.

They also discovered that the iPhone 4S includes a Skyworks 77464-20 chip and Avago ACPM-7181 power amplifier.

Toshiba America Electronic Components has announced the second-generation of its Visconti series of image recognition processors for automotive applications.

Most solar power component makers are coping with lower margins these days because of an industry downturn -- but solar inverter makers are suffering less.

The big number is 50. When companies can produce solar photovoltaic modules for less than 50瞽 per watt, solar energy will be able to compete directly with coal.