Linear, which makes semiconductors for industrial equipment and luxury cars, ranked above Microsoft and Apple - two companies with market valuations that are 30 to 50 times larger.

According to the latest quarterly report from Mercom Capital Group, M&A activity in the third quarter could signal the start of a period of consolidation within the PV industry. Mercom Capital reported that there was US$563 million spent in 20 M&A transactions in the quarter with details disclosed for only eight of these downstream market deals.

Moser Baer Clean Energy Limited commissioned Asia's largest solar farm in Banaskantha district of Gujarat.

US chipmakers ON Semiconductor and Microsemi said Tuesday they suspended production at factories in Thailand after floods damaged facilities, in a sign that supply chain disruptions could hurt production during a typically busy third quarter.

ASML has said orders in the fourth quarter will increase from the third-quarter level as customers add capacity and shift to more advanced-technology machines.

Infineon Technologies has produced the first chips on a 300mm thin wafer for power semiconductors at the Villach site in Austria.

Fusion-io has released the first upgrade to its in-server NAND flash card, the ioDrive2, doubling the card's speed, bandwidth and density, while maintaining its resiliency and endurance.

"We have a lot of big plans for it and we're working with Hynix Semiconductor to launch a replacement for flash in the summer of 2013 and also to address the solid-state drive market," said Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs.

PLX's UK Design Team has built a reputation for designing innovative and reliable system-on-chip (SOC) solutions and the acquired engineering team's expertise provides OCZ with additional resources for controller design.

Former chief executive and co-founder of US technology giant Apple Steve Jobs has died, the company said. He was 56. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve," Apple said.

One reason for the delay in both Q1 and Q2 could have been uncertainty on how to record the loss of manufacturing capacity, and capacity utilization, at Japanese companies affected by the aftermath of the great earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. This will have had a small but significant effect in the first quarter but is likely to have had a much bigger effect in the second quarter.

Built using 40nm CMOS process technology, the new Broadcom BCM2079x family slashes power consumption by more than 90%, uses 40% fewer components and has a 40% smaller board area, making it the smallest and most power efficient NFC solution on the market.

Infineon Technologies may scale back its investment plans amid a slowdown in the chip sector and as demand falls due to the uncertain economic climate, according to CEO Peter Bauer.