Intel will add support for DDR4 memory to its high-end computers in the third quarter of 2014, sources familiar with the company's plans said.

Canon is shifting capacity back to Japan in an apparent vindication of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's yen-weakening policies, which have made it more profitable for some Japanese manufacturers to produce and export from home.

An explosion and fire at a Mitsubishi Materials chemical plant in central Japan on Thursday afternoon killed five people and injured at least 12 others, Yokkaichi police said.

ARM's chief executive has said the emergence of low-cost smartphones and Apple's move into China will drive sales at the British microchip designer.

MediaTek is demonstrating its first LTE modem platform in its booth at CES 2014 located inside the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas.

United Microelectronics (UMC) has surpassed 15 million shipments for customer small display driver ICs (SDDI) manufactured using the foundry's 55nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology.

Qualcomm's CEO said his company has the capabilities to build ARM server chips but was careful not to disclose any product plans at the International CES in Las Vegas.

TSMC and AMD, and other companies have seen more than US$200 million in sales in 2013 for computing components used to create Bitcoins, Wedbush Securities said.

eMemory and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) plan to expand the deployment of their current collaboration on SMIC's eNVM platform development. The platform covers both one time programmable (OTP) and multiple times programmable (MTP) eNVM technologies, such as NeoBit, NeoFuse, NeoEE and NeoMTP, across a wide range of technology nodes ranging from 0.35-micron to 40nm.

Toshiba and SK Hynix will begin joint production of next-generation memory chips as early as fiscal 2016, bringing them to market ahead of US firm Micron Technology, The Nikkei learned Wednesday.

The new 358,000 square-foot facility will become TI's seventh assembly/test (A/T) operation. Located on the same property as TI's existing wafer fab in Chengdu, the site will become the company's only end-to-end wafer fabrication and A/T facility.

An executive of SK hynix said Thursday the firm will cooperate with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to supply highly-advanced chips for data-intensive devices.

A plant of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) was ordered to shut down Friday by the Kaohsiung Environmental Protection Bureau for multiple violations of regulations governing the discharge of industrial wastewater.

Just as its predecessors did, the LPDDR4 specification is aiming to double its data rates while slashing power consumption in half, but first publication of the spec by JEDEC won't be until 2014.

SK Hynix plans to build a new factory in South Korea to meet the growing demand for mobile devices, according to two people familiar with the matter.

MagnaChip Semiconductor has completed qualification of 0.18-micron EEPROM IP developed in partnership with eMemory Technology, a Taiwan-based non-volatile memory (NVM) IP provider.

Earlier this year, after Apple released the first 64-bit chip for smartphones, a Qualcomm spokesperson claimed the A7 processor was a "marketing gimmick" and that there is "zero benefit" to the consumer from the chip. Those comments were later walked back before the executive who made them was reassigned.

The acquisition expands ARM's position at the forefront of the visual computing and graphics industries. Additionally, the agreement enables Geomerics to build on their existing partnerships as well as accelerate their development in mobile.

Chip companies serving the automotive industry know exactly where the next-generation MCU battle will be played out: high-performance MCUs with fast-access flash memory at 40-nanometer process.

CSR, the Cambridge-based microchip maker, has announced a retreat from the digital camera market as sales decline and amateur photographers increasingly rely on smartphones.

Imagination Technologies yesterday saw its shares crash 16% to a three-year low, amid slowing smartphone growth and a slide in profits.

Qualcomm will take a wait and see approach before turning to Intel's expanding foundry operation to manufacture its chips, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said Wednesday.

The new Snapdragon 410 chipsets are manufactured using 28nm process technology. They feature processors that are 64-bit capable along with superior graphics performance with the Adreno 306 GPU, 1080p video playback and up to a 13-megapixel camera.

Rambus and Micron Technology have signed a broad patent cross-license agreement, giving Micron the right to use any Rambus patent for the manufacture of specified integrated circuit products, including memories.

"Our latest checks for the 20nm technology production levels at TSMC are weaker than expectations and are projected to reach only 5,000 wpm by year-end," say BlueFin Research Partners anaylsts.

Electronics firm Sony is considering the purchase of a Japanese chip plant from Renesas Electronics so that it can enhance production of smartphone image sensors, reports said.

Xilinx has made its first customer shipment of a 20-nm UltraScale device, which is implemented in TSMC's 20nm process technology.

The IMEC research center has demonstrated a new FinFET using III-V compound semiconductor material produced on 300mm wafers. This is the first time that such transistors have been produced.

South Korea's largest family-owned conglomerate, Samsung Group, on Monday promoted the group owner's daughter to president of its de-facto holding firm.

David Einhorn's hedge fund Greenlight Capital reported a stake of about 23.02 million shares in US memory chipmaker Micron Technology, according to a filing on Monday.

Qualcomm Life, launched two years ago as a division of the San Diego-based telecommunications giant Qualcomm, is building software and protocols that could bring some order to the chaos of health data. Its first product, called the 2Net Platform, is a system for getting wireless data off those devices and onto the Internet servers of clients, like health device makers or hospitals.

A software engineer formally involved in the development of the Siri voice assistant at Apple has joined Samsung's new talking internet of things initiative.

Japan's Panasonic will sell three domestic semiconductor factories to Israel's TowerJazz as early as the current business year ending March, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, bringing the embattled electronics giant closer to completing the overhaul of its loss-making businesses.

The dynamics of the solid-state state drive market are shifting, and for Abhi Talwalkar it's been a disappointing shift in 2013.

Apple has agreed to acquire PrimeSense, the maker of motion-tracking chip technology that was used in Microsoft's Kinect game console.

Qualcomm said the probe involved China's anti-monopoly law, but added that regulators told it the "substance of the investigation is confidential."

Rumors have buzzed surrounding ARM' possible release of 128-bit chip designs to power various new smartphones. Most recently, via PCPro UK, the company was cited by the Korea Herald to promise 128-bit architecture "within the next two years."

More than 20 Japanese and US semiconductor-related companies are teaming up to develop a mass production method for next-generation memory chips.