PTI will provide final manufacturing services to Spansion at the Suzhou facility pursuant to a Supply Agreement between Spansion LLC and PTI. "We expect an uninterrupted supply of products to our customers after the transfer of ownership of the Suzhou facility...

Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASM International will eliminate 106 jobs as it shutters its manufacturing facility in Phoenix and shifts those operations to Singapore.

Cloud computing and flash-based storage, two fast-emerging IT technologies, are driving each other forward as users of Internet-based services like social networks demand near-real-time access to ever-growing amounts of data.

Texas Instruments has placed a bid of US$172.5 million on used 300mm equipment from the now-shuttered Qimonda fab near Richmond, Va. The Dallas-based company plans to use the equipment for 300mm analog production.

"IC-packaging will almost certainly happen in Vietnam, but it has been delayed by one or two years..."

Pure Wafer, a provider of silicon wafers and wafer services based on reclaimed wafers, has announced plans to raise £2.3 million (US$3.8 million) and restructure its debt, along with its delayed interim financial results to Dec. 30, 2008.

Texas Instruments (TI) could be interested in taking over Qimonda's US-based assets, writes news service swissinfo.ch.

Hynix is expected to swing to an operating profit in the July to September period, ending its seventh consecutive quarterly loss. Samsung may also see profits rise further in its semiconductor unit in the third quarter.

The Flash Memory Summit brought a range of opinions on the state of the NAND industry, scaling, 3-bit-per-cell and solid-state drives (SSDs).

Verigy, a semiconductor testing company, has posted a net loss of US$21 million in its third quarter ended July 31, 2009, compared to net income of US$18 million in the prior year period.

Samsung Electronics and Toshiba said they have received notices from the US Justice Department informing them that an antitrust investigation into the flash-memory chip market had ended.

Memory chip makers will offer more sophisticated flash drives for smartphones - technology that will be comparable to the solid-state drives (SSD) found in laptops today.

When we asked Jensen about Globalfoundries, the big man from Nvidia said that Nvidia likes to work with companies that are customer centric. Since TSMC has 200 customers its kind of hard to be in center of attention, while such a thing might be possible with some alternative fab companies, such as Globalfoundies.

MEMS packaging may take an evolutionary leap forward into wafer-level packaging, driven by large IDMs and foundries, analysts said. "TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and others are talking about making MEMS parts...and they have the resources to do the package too.

Eli Harari, founder, chairman and chief executive of SanDisk, made the predications during a keynote. He also warned that the NAND industry is at the "crossroads," as there is a "disconnect" between future capacity requirements and demand.

Advanced Inquiry Systems, a developer of wafer-level sensing systems for memory testing, has closed an US$11 million Series B financing round with all its current investors participating.

Nano Solar Technology has ordered Oerlikon Solar's 120MW end-to-end Micromorph production line for making thin film solar modules.

"The cost involved in shrinking features to improve performance is a limiting factor in keeping pace with Moore's Law and a concern across the semiconductor industry," said Spike Narayan, manager, Science & Technology, IBM Research. "The combination of this directed self-assembly with today's fabrication technology eventually could lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip-making process."

A Yale University team led by Professor TP Ma has proposed a DRAM that marries a ferroelectric material with a silicon transistor. While the polarization of the ferroelectric decays, the structure, refresh cycle, power consumption and speed of the FeDRAM could offer advantages over conventional DRAMs, Ma said.

"On the DRAM side, there are shortages of DDR3 SDRAM due to surprising demand in the server and other markets...The price and demand picture for NAND are also improving," said Brian Shirley, VP of Micron Technology's memory group.

Although the overall semiconductor market is expected to drop by 46% in 2009, it shows signs of rapid recovery, according to The Information Network market research company.

A run of poor earnings has damped confidence in once-booming solar companies.

Converge has tracked increased demand from module manufacturers for 128x8 DDR2 chips, both in PC667 and PC800 speeds. However, there are mixed opinions on why the market has become so tight for these modules.

"The operation of our 8-inch DRAM line in Austin, Texas, will be stopped from October due to production inefficiencies. We will upgrade the line to a 12-inch facility," company spokesman Kenneth Hong told The Korea Times.

Samsung Group's former chairman Lee Kun Hee was found guilty of breach-of-duty for his role in causing losses at Samsung SDS.