Seagate has shipped its one millionth solid state hybrid drive for laptop PCs after launching the product - Momentus XT - in spring 2010. Major computer makers including Alienware, ASUS, Dell, Sony and Toshiba now offer laptops powered by the 2.5-inch drive.

Bridgelux expects to begin making LED chips on silicon wafers in about two years, a technology transition which promises to slash LED lighting costs.

Centrotherm Photovoltaics AG (CTN), a German maker of production equipment for the solar industry, rose the most in almost three years, buoyed by surging sales in Asia.

Despite a significant increase in sales in the second quarter of 2011, Q-Cells has warned that losses reached ??95.8 million in the first half of the year, due to price declines, inventory write-offs and other one time issues.

SanDisk has implemented the new SATA 繕SSD specification into its SanDisk iSSD product line of postage stamp-sized embedded SSDs.

Monday's announcement that China is to introduce a national photovoltaic feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme was received well by many in the industry, however analyst opinion is that the Chinese tier-one manufacturers stand to gain the most.

OmniVision is promising an quarter-inch, 8-megapixel OV8850 CMOS sensor that the company says is 20% slimmer than any competing 8-megapixel module.

We won't call it OMAP 6, but the 20nm chip that is planned as a successor of OMAP 5 should enable true all day computing...

Rebates for Los Angeles solar panel installations are 32% lower under the newly relaunched Solar Initiative Program, which will start accepting applications next month.

Not be outdone by rivals such as Yingli Green in the utility-scale PV power plant business in China, Trina Solar has secured a 30MW module supply agreement with Huanghe Hydropower Development Co. Huanghe Hydropower is planning two ground-mounted solar projects in China's Qinghai Province, of which delivery is expected to start from August and continue through October of this year.

Bridgelux Inc., a maker of light- emitting diode, or LED, lighting technologies, received $60 million in financing led by Craton Equity Partners

The Ontario government has negotiated a 75-per-cent cut in its controversial subsidy to a Korean consortium that is building new wind and solar farms in the province.

Dow Corning Corporation has announced that its subsidiary Hemlock Semiconductor Group is selling all of the polysilicon it produces, and remains sold-out "for the foreseeable future".

MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., which makes wafers for solar panels, said Wednesday that its second-quarter profit climbed, helped by a boost in revenue from the resolution of a wafer supply agreement with Suntech Power Holdings Co.

While global semiconductor revenue is projected to expand by 7.2% in 2011, Walden Rhines, chairman and CEO of EDA vendor Mentor Graphics, sounds a note of caution about maintaining this growth in 2012.

Samsung Electronics has acquired Grandis, a maker of magnetic random access memory (MRAM) technology known as spin transfer torque (STT-RAM). Samsung said Grandis will be merged into its R&D operations "that are focused on developing the next evolution of memory, where new semiconductor materials and structures are reviewed for their long-term commercial value."

LED Roadway Lighting will supply 2580 SSL street lights to Edmonton, Canada, Kingsun Optoelectronic completes LED highway lighting project in Shenzhen, China, and Las Vegas and UK SSL updates.

Having cited weaker-than-expected financial results for the first quarter of 2011, due in part to the halt in PV installations in the key Italian market , Trina Solar has revised its second-quarter guidance, which points to the demand issues in Italy for the company's lower sales expectations.

Photovoltaic cells are best known for turning sunlight into electrical power - and they're big business. But did you know that there's a type of PV cell that eats heat instead of light to make power? It could replace the Li-ion battery in your cell phone, and it may also be used to scavenge waste heat from almost anything that normally dumps it into the environment, from your TV's electronics to your car's engine (even an electrical one).

HiSilicon Technologies has licensed a range of ARM technology for use across the breadth of its communications chip design activities including: 3G/4G basestations, networking infrastructure and mobile computing applications.

A single SuperScale controller equipped Z-Drive R4 is capable of transferring up to 2800 megabytes per second (MB/s) and completing over 500,000 input-output operations per second (IOPS), while a dual SuperScale controller card reaches an astounding 5600 MB/s and 1.2 million IOPS.

Kingston Technology has announced it is shipping the HyperX SSD, its first SATA Rev. 3.0 6Gb/s solid-state drive. The Kingston HyperX SSD features the latest SandForce controller and is designed for enthusiasts, gamers and performance users.

LED chip, lamp and lighting fixture maker Cree Inc of Durham, NC, USA has launched what it claims is the first system-level LED downlight for the international 80-100mm MR16 market. A direct replacement for the 50W MR16-based fixture, the CR100 downlight surpasses its counterpart in brightness and efficacy.