Booming sales and manufacturing of smartphones in China by upstart brands such as Xiaomi have helped to make the country's electronics industry one of the world's largest.

Samsung is already pushing out 14nm technology, using its own Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge smartphones to demonstrate its impressive new fabrication technology. But most don't know that the South Korean electronics giant has partnered with Globalfoundries, with the latter now spinning up its production of 14nm technology.

The company will begin volume production of its 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) in the middle of 2015 and break ground on a new 10nm fab next year.

Some US and European chipmakers, such as Intel, could benefit from China's push to build up its semiconductor industry into a global power, said Jefferies in a new research report.

There are a few possible explanations for the lack of Cortex-A57 design wins, and they involve physics and economics.

Shares in Toshiba fell nearly 5% on Monday after the company said it was looking into possible accounting irregularities, its second investigation into its bookkeeping practices in less then two years.

The guidance is slightly better than an average 35% decline forecast by a Dow Jones survey of eight analysts.

Dow Chemical is under pressure to deal with financial troubles in its Korean businesses after its strategic plans were put on hold due to issues with two major Korean clients.

Samsung Electronics may end up saving arch nemesis Apple about $533 million. That's how much Apple was told to pay after a jury in February said its iTunes service infringed patents owned by Texas licensing firm Smartflash.

The volumes of the FPGA market are tiny by comparison to Intel's computer markets. Some have questioned a deal that would require spending as much as $13 billion to acquire just less than $2 billion in annual revenues.

The 930 is a huge leap forward in a very short timeframe.

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group and affiliated online payment service Alipay are aiming to use facial recognition technology to take the place of passwords.

Integrated Silicon Solution (ISSI) and a Chinese consortium of investors led by Summitview Capital have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which the consortium will acquire all of the outstanding shares of ISSI for US$19.25 per share in cash. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015.

Chip investors were handed a buying opportunity last week, as the group fell off a cliff on signs that the rising US dollar is crimping demand. But there is nothing fundamentally wrong with their industry.

China's Suzhou PowerCore Technology said it would offer its own variant of the IBM Power8 microprocessor, the first chip to emerge from the program, which is known as OpenPower. The CP1, as the Chinese chip is called, is expected to be used initially by another Chinese company called Zoom Netcom in a new line of servers called RedPower.

TSMC fell for a fifth day in Taipei trading, its longest losing streak in two years, after at least four analysts published reports saying a stronger U.S. dollar may weaken smartphone chip demand.

Intel is in advanced talks to buy chip partner Altera, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would represent the semiconductor giant's biggest-ever acquisition.

RBC Capital Markets chip analyst Doug Freedman this morning writes that chip maker Nvidia, which makes no parts itself, appears to have moved some of its orders for making its chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to Samsung Electronics, and that this may presage giving some foundry business to Intel.

TSMC will snatch more orders for Apple's A9 processor at the expense of Samsung, which is having yield problems with its most advanced technology node, according to sources interviewed by EE Times.

Texas Instruments (TI) has announced the new SimpleLink ultra-low power wireless microcontroller (MCU) platform that helps customers go battery-less with energy harvesting or enjoy always-on, coin cell-powered operation for multiple years.

TSMC has been working hard on the next step, the 10nm node. Its management has said that 10nm would begin to make money late 2016.

The memo sent to employees by Cypress founder and CEO TJ Rodgers on Wednesday shows plans to lay off about 1,600 workers worldwide with severances over the next three weeks, equally split between the two companies, with all North American employees being notified of their status by Friday.

Synopsys has announced that its Galaxy Design Platform enables 90% of the production tapeouts of FinFET-based designs.

The venture-backed Bitcoin startup CoinTerra has filed for bankruptcy, making it the second major miner manufacturer to do so in recent months.

Toshiba has announced the launch of "T4KB3", a 13-megapixel BSI CMOS image sensor with the optical format of 1/3.07 inch for smartphones and tablets. Sample shipments start today.

This is the largest acquisition that HP has made since it acquired Autonomy for nearly US$12 billion in 2011. Aruba Networks is expected to be a part of the new HP Enterprise Company by October this year.

Spansion has introduced the newest 512Mb density member of the FS-S serial NOR flash family. Spansion's FS-S family boasts the industry's fastest 1.8V serial peripheral interface (SPI) read performance at 80MBytes/s with quad DDR (Double Data Rate) at 80MHz clock speeds, 50% faster than most other high-density 1.8V SPI devices currently available.

A judge has approved a US$415 million settlement in a Silicon Valley employee hiring case, calling the amount "substantial" to settle claims that Apple, Google, Adobe Systems and Intel conspired not to hire each other's workers.

The merged entity will become the market leader in auto semiconductor solutions and the market leader in general purpose MCU products, according to the companies.

A major gripe about smartwatches is that the battery on most devices lasts only about a day. Looking to address that problem, both Broadcom and Texas Instruments have unveiled new platforms for their chips that are designed to help smartwatches and other small devices sip power instead of chug it.

Avago Technologies and Emulex entered into a definitive agreement under which Avago will acquire Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately US$606 million, or US$609 million net of cash and debt acquired.

Qualcomm Technologies has announced the Snapdragon 620, 618, 425 and 415 processors, supporting a wide range of mobile devices with high-end features - at a broader range of price points.

Samsung Electronics gave a big boost on Wednesday to Seoul's ambitions to become a global hub for the offshore yuan business, saying it was preparing to start trading the Chinese currency directly with the South Korean won.

Fifty years after Gordon Moore first described the trend that has driven technology, Intel says scaling is same as it ever was. But other chipmakers, who are struggling to realize the same benefits from good old-fashioned scaling, are increasingly looking for less-expensive alternatives.

The aggressive push by MediaTek to enter the global long-term evolution (LTE) market in competition with leader Qualcomm of the US is not likely to show significant results until 2016, according to Randy Abrams, Taiwan head of equities research for Credit Suisse.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) of China is seeking to take over Dongbu HiTek, industry sources said Monday.

Intel will describe what it claims are some of the world's smallest DRAM and I/O circuits here this week, a testament to its 14nm process technology. In a preview of at least five papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, one Intel executive also continued to express optimism about the company's work on 10nm and 7nm nodes.

According to a new report (Korean) from South Korea, LG has started working on a next-generation high-end SoC that's going to use the recently announced Cortex-A72 CPU and an unnamed Mali GPU (likely the high-end Mali-T880).

Freescale Semiconductor, the $11 billion tech company spun out of Motorola in 2004, is in sale talks.

ARM has acquired Offspark, a Netherlands-based supplier of Transport Layer Security, that will get folded into its mbed operating system for its Cortex-M cores.