A homeowner could earn up to 900 pounds (US$1,433) each year for a typical 2.5 kilowatt solar PV system and save an additional 140 pounds on their annual electricity bill, according to an announcement by the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Samyang Optics has said it will sell electric cars produced by US-based ZAP in South Korea from April. It also expects to eventually assemble electric cars using ZAP's technology.

India has seen how the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi has, with a budget of US$10 billion, set about manouvering its way into a key place in the semiconductor industry with the creation of Globalfoundries.

Intel will build PV installations targeted at eight US locations in four states, generating around 2.5 MW, and has increased its renewable energy credit purchases by 10%, powering more than 51% of its estimated US electricity use.

Japanese trading house Marubeni has said it has received an order for 16 Nikon LCD-making machines from China's Beijing BOE Display Technology. The equipment will be installed in the China-based company's 8.5-generation thin film transistor LCD panel production line.

The company, which receives licensing fees from patents of its memory chip designs, lost US$23.3 million compared with a loss of US$15.5 million in fourth-quarter 2008.

Samsung Electronics has overtaken Hewlett-Packard as the world's biggest technology company by sales, a sign of how strongly some South Korean companies have bounced back from the economic downturn.

Creditors rescued Hynix after it almost collapsed in 2001 under the weight of its debts. Spurred on by the company's strong turnround and a brighter outlook for the semiconductor sector, creditors have been anxious to sell to recoup their original investment worth US$4.6 billion.

"Am I setting very aggressive targets? Yes," said Ibrahim Ajami, CEO of Advanced Technology Investment Co., Globalfoundries' controlling shareholder. "We need to be a US$5 billion company in the next two to three years."

According to Intel and Micron, the 25nm, 8Gb device is currently sampling, and is expected to enter mass production before the second half of 2010.

SanDisk beat analysts' estimates as sales for memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras, USB flash drives and other electronics climbed 22% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter.

In 2009, TSMC topped the list of foundries with US$9.0 billion in sales. TSMC's sales were about 3X that of UMC, which in turn had more than the combined foundry sales of Chartered and SMIC in 2009.

Apple's iPad device may significantly increase demand for components such as touch screens and memory chips, especially if it succeeds in creating a new product category and spawning competitors, according to industry analysts.

The Japanese conglomerate, whose business encompasses everything from memory chips to household electronics to nuclear power plants, has said it booked a much smaller loss in the October-December quarter than a year earlier.

Korea Exchange Bank has confirmed that the creditors of Hynix Semiconductor failed to receive any bids for their stake in the chip maker by the deadline.

Currently Seagate makes a Pulsar SSD with a 3Gbit/s SATA interface. It fits in a 2.5-inch HDD slot in a disk drive enclosure. A PCIe-connected SSD fits into a server as a plug-in flash card and that's where LSI comes in.

A person familiar with the situation has told Dow Jones Newswires that the stake sale process hasn't been going well with no particular company showing an interest in the Hynix stake.

Toshiba, which competes with Samsung Electronics in chips and with Areva and General Electric in nuclear power, is likely to miss the market consensus figure for its quarterly operating profit, according to the Nikkei business daily.

A vice president of Samsung Electronics has committed suicide. He joined Samsung in 1992 and mostly worked at its semiconductor and flash memory division.

Since the new device apparently will rely heavily on NAND flash for its computing and storage needs, and because the most recent products Apple has produced have tended to sell very well, the NAND flash industry may be looking at a major stabilizing factor.

"These comments beg the question how will the equipment market grow 50-plus-percent in 2010 with no new fabs and no new capacity additions, when it dropped nearly 50% in 2009 with no new fabs and no new capacity additions?"

Abu Dhabi's ATIC, which helped create Globalfoundries when AMD spun off its manufacturing business, is looking to assume full control of the company.

Hynix Semiconductor has agreed to pay US$3.32 million to settle a claim in the US accusing the company of price-fixing on memory chips, according to a US court record.

China's Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. (AMEC) also made a payment to Applied Materials of an undisclosed amount, and the parties agreed to collaborate on projects in the future.

Rambus, which designs memory chips, said that an administrative judge for the US International Trade Commission has ruled that graphics chip maker Nvidia has violated three of its patents.