"In the near term, both companies should benefit by cross-selling their products to largely non-overlapping customer bases," writes Linley Gwennap with The Linley Group. "For the longer term, the acquisition gives Nvidia an opportunity to expand the market for "Tegra" by developing single-chip products that combine the application and baseband processors."

Canadian Solar Inc.'s first-quarter profit soared as shipments jumped and gross margins expanded, although the bottom line missed analysts expectations as silicon costs increased and the company recorded a derivatives loss.

This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus' breakthrough technologies available for licensing with complementary technologies from CRI that include patented innovations and solutions for content protection, network security, anti-counterfeiting and financial services.

A US appeals court found memory chip designer Rambus Inc was wrong to shred hundreds of boxes of documents relevant in two patent infringement lawsuits it filed, sending its shares down sharply.

The 30 new jobs come in addition to the previously announced 300 engineers and technicians positions that Samsung Austin Semiconductor is hiring in the first six months of 2011.

Manosha Karunatilaka, a former account manager at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), pleaded guilty to charges that he participated in an insider trading scheme tied to Primary Global Research, an expert network firm.

Consumer solid-state drives will have a break-out year in 2012 due to falling prices, which will make SSDs a primary storage option for mainstream users, Gartner said.

Mosaid Technologies has commenced patent infringement litigation against Elpida Memory of Japan. Two other companies, Buffalo and Axiontech, are also named as defendants in the suit.

TSMC has said it won't start using three-dimensional transistors to produce semiconductors before the capacity of 2D chips reaches its limit, adding the infrastructure for the next generation of transistors is still "immature."

Globalfoundries is believed to be working on similar technology but is about two years behind Intel to bring it into the shops. However the outfit does not seem to be in any hurry.

Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. and First Solar Inc., the world's top solar panel suppliers, warned Monday that potential cuts in European government subsidies for solar power could lead to both lower demand and prices for their products, a combination that could hit their bottom lines.

ARM expects to "compete at a consistently high level" in the mobile device market despite the news that rival Intel has a new process for making chips that could prove to be attractive to makers of tablets, smartphones and other similar devices.

Cree is announced to make a breakthrough on the record of 231 lumens per watt for a white power LED.

Broadcom announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SC Square, security software developer based in Israel.

As part of the investment volume planned for the 2011 fiscal year, Infineon Technologies is investing about Euro 198 million in production capacity expansion and in R&D in Austria. Infineon intends to create 400 jobs in Austria in the course of this fiscal year.

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.

Semiconductor company Rubicon Technology, Inc. (RBCN: News ) reported Thursday a profit for the first quarter that climbed from last year, boosted by strong margin expansion and revenue growth amid strong demand.

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Applied Materials's US$4.9 billion purchase of Varian Semiconductor may trigger a round of acquisitions in the chip-machinery industry, making companies such as Novellus Systems possible targets.