Hynix Semiconductor said on Tuesday it would delay the planned sale of a stake in its Chinese joint venture to partner Numonyx by one year. South Korea-based Hynix had planned to sell a stake worth US$100 million to Numonyx as the latter sought to boost its control over the Chinese chip plant. It already sold half the stake and was supposed to sell the rest by the end of this year.

"We will discuss with our controlling shareholders to decide on a loan if necessary," Park Hyun, a spokesman for Ichon, South Korea-based Hynix, said by telephone Monday. Park said details such as the amount, timing and method haven't been determined.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The ruling is a victory for defendants Qualcomm, Motorola, Spansion, STMicroelectronics NV, Freescale Semiconductor and ATI Technologies, a company purchased in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices. The commission's administrative law judge found that the two Tessera patents were valid, but weren't infringed by the defendants. "It's a great result," said Alex Rogers, Qualcomm's senior vice president and legal counsel.

German chip maker Qimonda, which is majority-owned by Infineon, needs a helping hand. Its memory chips are struggling in an oversupplied market, and the firm is burning cash at a rate of $250.0 million per quarter. Investors have deserted the company, while Infineon is desperately trying to offload as much of its stake as possible. If current talks with potential investors fail, the company faces a cash crisis in the next few months.

Taiwan stocks opened 0.55 percent lower on Monday, pulling back from a more than two-week closing high, as tech shares fell after a Hon Hai subsidiary said it would cut staff in Hungary and industry sources said TSMC aimed to cut costs by 20 percent.

Qimonda announced today that it is making progress in its discussions with strategic and financial investors on potential partnerships with Qimonda, and that it will delay the release of its financial results for the fourth quarter of its 2008 financial year and its full financial year ended September 30, 2008 until mid-December while these discussions are proceeding.

Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.

Gartner analysts have advised CIOs in the Asia Pacific region to plan for future growth. Speaking in the opening keynote presentation at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Sydney, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research Peter Sondergaard said that an economic downturn can be a perfect time to undertake projects that warrant priority, because of their impact on future growth.

Taiwan stocks rose 0.15 percent on Friday to a more than two-week closing high, as DRAM makers such as Powerchip surged after saying Japanese rival Elpida would boost its stake in their joint venture. DRAM chip makers surged, with Powerchip and Nanya Technology both up by their 7 percent daily limit, helping lift the electronics sub-index by 0.63 percent.

Chip makers are shutting down less-productive factories, delaying investment projects and even cutting staff in a sign that the global economic slowdown and the credit crunch are taking a hefty toll on demand and hurting their operations. The coming few months could be critical for several memory-chip makers in Asia, Europe and the US as they continue to grapple with weak demand and a severe cash crunch amid plunging chip prices, which remain well below their manufacturing costs.

Infineon said on Saturday that Fairchild Semiconductor's patent lawsuit against the German chip maker had been filed in response to a similar case brought by Infineon against its US rival. The two companies are in a legal tussle over so called power chips that regulate electricity supply in computers, sold by Infineon under its CoolMOS and OptiMOS as well as Infineon IGBT and CanPak brands.

German micro-chip maker Infineon (IFXGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) plans to step up its recent cost cutting programme and is in talks with shop stewards about shortened working weeks, it said on Saturday. A spokesman for the company confirmed a pre-release of a report in Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag that Infineon was to slash costs beyond the 200 million euro ($258.8 million) programme already announced.

Fab capacity utilisation in Q3 was high for advanced processes and 300mm fabs but overall showed a decline, according to the latest Semiconductor Industry Capacity Statistics (SICAS) report, with the foundry industry experiencing sharp declines in capacity, actual wafer starts and capacity utilisation.

Investors are also expecting a decline in mobile phone demand in 2009. Dow component Intel Corp slid 1.3 percent to $13.80 while Applied Material was off 0.9 percent to $9.64 and National Semiconductor slid 1.8 percent to $11.05.

STMicroelectronics NV, Europe's largest semiconductor maker, said fourth-quarter revenue and gross margin will miss forecasts after a slowdown in demand from the wireless, automotive and computer peripherals industries.

The European Commission on Thursday officially approved an Ericsson-STMicroelectronics joint venture to provide wireless platforms for handsets and semiconductors for mobile communications.

The world's top two contract chip makers, TSMC and UMC, are preparing to cut costs by up to 20 percent as their industry heads into a sharp downturn, industry sources said on Friday. Taking about a two-thirds share of the global foundry market together, the two Taiwan firms are facing a global economic slowdown that has forced consumers to cut spending on new PCs, cellphones and flat-screen TVs that require microchips.

AMD's manufacturing arm which is heading for a spin-off to form a foundry services provider, regards the current downturn as a good anti-cyclical investment opportunity. Nevertheless, the company is aware of the challenges they are approaching, said two top managers of the company. While the Foundry Company will maintain and expand its production capacity in Dresden and later plans to build a new fab in upstate New York, the headquarters will be placed in the Silicon Valley.

"Certainly we wouldn't abandon this industry" in Taiwan, which accounts for about 30 percent of global supplies, Siew said yesterday at an American Chamber of Commerce meeting in Taipei, when asked what the government would do to support the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market. "We should take this opportunity to consolidate the industry to become more competitive," he said.

The decision by Samsung to abandon its six-inch, or 150-millimeter, wafer fabrication lines and focus production on its eight-inch and 12-inch wafer lines reflects a desperate attempt to improve the efficiency of its product lineup.

The Nikkei business daily said Elpida, the world's No. 3 maker of dynamic random access memory, will need to spend about 4 billion yen ($42 million) to raise its stake in Rexchip Electronics.

Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba is considering delaying construction of two new domestic chip plants amid slowing demand and falling prices, Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday.

Semiconductor equipment companies are using memory semiconductor recession as opportunity to grow further. World economic downturn has hit both local and foreign equipment makers, so local makers believe that if the memory semiconductor market is recovered, only companies that have done their best to cut cost will take the benefit of semiconductor market recovery.

"There is no denying that fundamental weakness in demand is turning from bad to worse," Irvin Seah, an economist at DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in Singapore, said in a report today. The outlook for manufacturers in the coming months "will not be a pretty picture."

"In view of the current global financial turmoil we are drawing $400 million under our revolving credit facility. This is a proactive financial decision in order to secure availability of this facility in a turbulent financial market environment," said Karl-Henrik Sundstrom, NXP's chief financial officer, in a statement.

The European Commission Wednesday cleared Swedish mobile telecommunications company Ericsson (ERIC) and STMicroelectronics NV to jointly produce chipsets for mobile phones.

Rambus shares surged for the second straight day Wednesday after the chip maker received a positive pre-trial ruling in California in its patent case against some of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. According to a court document on Rambus's Web site, on Monday a U.S. District judge issued a summary decision in favor of Rambus, saying the chip makers infringed on certain aspects of Rambus's patents. The chipmakers named in the case are Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, Nanya Technology and Micron Technology.

Lam Research has become the latest capital equipment industry company to announce layoffs, this week stating it would cut 600 jobs. The workforce reduction represents approximately 15% of Lam's total headcount and will impact regular, temporary, and contract employee positions, according to an SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) filing made Thursday.

In a report titled "Death by 1000 paper cuts: Cutting estimates and targets on most chip firms," FBR Capital Markets downgraded its estimates for several semiconductor industry companies including AMD, Maxim, and National Semiconductor.