Toshiba said on Tuesday it planned to start production of solid-state drives (SSD) overseas to cut costs and increase output, beginning assembly in the Philippines by the middle of the year. The Nikkei business daily reported Toshiba aimed to generate 100 billion yen ($1 billion) in SSD sales in the year starting April 2010, more than 10 times the current figure.

TI narrowed the range of its first-quarter forecast, with the midpoint of its revenue guidance rising 2.7%.

Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), a Taiwan-based IC packaging and test services provider, has expressed interest in the packaging and test unit of STMicroelectronics, two industry sources close to ASE told mergermarket.

At the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference last year, AMD's Bruno La Fontaine revealed the IBM Alliance's Typhoon, a 45nm full-field test chip using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the first metal level. With that project finished the middle of last year, the alliance — including IBM, AMD, Toshiba and other partners — decided to kick it up a notch. "We were going to move on to 32nm, but technology is moving so fast, if we spent our time on that, we would never get to 16nm, which is where EUV will be used..."

Shares in Asia's major makers of DRAM chips fell sharply Friday (March 6), on profit-taking and concerns that Taiwan's proposal to realign its struggling chip sector through mergers may take time and do little to change weak industry fundamentals.

Micron is bidding for between $20 million and $100 million to convert idle buildings in Boise and Nampa to manufacture solar panels and high-efficiency lighting components. The company says its plan could establish Idaho as a world leader in developing and manufacturing solar modules or LED lighting, or both.

Japan's government is fortifying its defense of the corporate sector by broadening sources of public funding for companies struggling to cope with the deepening recession. Goldman Sachs analysts in a report Friday identified 15 Japanese technology companies on their financial risk watch list.

It seems that more and more power will consolidate into the hands of fewer and fewer players.

There's a glimmer of hope for the thousands of Spansion employees outraged at their sudden firing last week. Spansion CEO John Kispert has issued a statement through a spokesman declaring the company would try to get employees the money they are owed through a bankruptcy court.

KLA-Tencor has unveiled a solar inspection system, the PVI-6, which performs optical in-line, dual-sided inspection of photovoltaic (PV) wafers and cells. The tool is part of a family of modules that inspect solar cells throughout the production process, from bare wafer to silicon nitride (SiN) coating, metallization, and final classification. The company said the PVI-6 software improves the overall yield of the solar cell production process and supports more accurate product classification.

Logic-chip maker Xilinx said sales in its fourth quarter would decline less than forecast, helped by better-than-expected wireless-communications sales. The forecast comes a day after rival Altera presented a more optimistic -- though still muted -- view of first-quarter revenue than it had in January because of better-than-expected demand from manufacturers providing equipment for Chinese 3G wireless networks.

For a long time, Intel counted Advanced Micro Devices as its chief rival. These days, it's looking more like Intel and Qualcomm will be going mano-a-mano. While Intel says it retain full control of the process—essentially leaving TSMC as a contract manufacturer—the move clearly is aimed at stealing market share from British chip designer ARM, which licenses it products to Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freescale and other companies.

First Solar has agreed to acquire the solar-project pipeline of US peer OptiSolar for US$400 million in stock, a deal that will give the solar-panel maker a bigger foothold in the US utility segment.

Programmable chipmaker Altera said on Monday first-quarter sales would decline by a more moderate percentage than it previously expected thanks to demand for next-generation wireless equipment in China.

The company that was at one time the world's principal provider of NOR flash memory -- the more non-volatile variety -- had its own plans to go "asset light," to use a now familiar phrase, and to concentrate on licensing its intellectual property to companies with the muscle to do the heavy lifting. It sounds like a plan AMD just executed last month. As it turns out, Spansion had also been planning to license others to produce its designs.

The new management of The Foundry Company, which includes former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, is expected to announce the official name of the company soon. When AMD does split in two, Meyer said he will not have any management role in the new company. However, AMD does stand to be The Foundry Company's largest customer, which will continue to tie the two companies together. Meyer also suggested that AMD might switch some of its ATI graphics chip production to The Foundry Company as well.

DRAM manufacturers may not see the financial benefits of the expected rebound in memory device prices until the second-half of 2009, but can take comfort from the latest forecast from IC Insights that prices will rise from 1Q09 onwards, calling a bottom to the precipitous declines year-on-year, due to the massive overcapacity and now weakening demand.

On Monday morning, there will be a chip industry summit of sorts: the world's largest chipmaker and the world's largest chip foundry will make a strategic announcement at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. Whatever the deal is, it's probably something TSMC needs more desperately than Intel does. With its smaller chip customers swooning, one has to imagine Tsai might cut Intel a pretty sweet deal to get any business the chip giant would like to send his way.

Hundreds of laid-off Qimonda Richmond employees will not be paid their final paychecks or receive wages for vacation days and time off they earned before being dismissed by the memory-chip maker.

As co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel — as well as Intel's former chief executive and chairman — Gordon Moore has monitored the evolution of the computer-chip industry for more than half a century. "I don't have any crystal ball on that. Its seems like it's still going down. It's probably going to be 2010, more or less. I don't think we're falling off the edge of the Earth. But it's been a terrible shock to the whole system".

Intel and TSMC have scheduled a joint press conference on Monday (March 2), an unusual step for Intel, which has rarely outsourced any manufacturing to a third party. The event will be hosted by Intel execs Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group and Sean Maloney, the company's chief marketing officer. Both will be joined by TSMC execs Rick Tsai, TSMC's president and chief executive, and Jason Chen, TSMC's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing.