With Siltronic's aging Portland factory weathering one of the steepest downturns in its history, the German silicon wafer manufacturer is raising the prospect of renewal to city officials.

China's major solar wafer producer LDK Solar said that it still enjoys stable standing orders despite the on-going global financial crisis that significantly affected international solar cell markets.

It wasn't long ago that Silicon Valley's tech industry, whose operations and customers span the planet, was confident its global reach would help it escape the worst of the deep American recession. But that hasn't happened. Instead, the valley's top companies collectively are suffering the biggest slump since the dot-com bust.

According to Gartner Inc analysis, both memory segments showed some pricing gains in the business week ending April 10.

Qimonda AG's Portuguese unit said it's reducing its workforce to 1,000 and suspending the contracts of 800 of the remaining employees for six months.

"Samsung Electronics was asked to supply 50 million 8Gb NAND flash chips to Apple, while Hynix was set to supply 20 million," a high-ranking industry source told The Korea Times by Monday.

According to IC Insights' update to its 2009 forecast, released Thursday, the "perfect storm" of negative factors that have damaged business in the first half of 2009 will bring about a much more "friendly" environment for the IC industry in the second half of the year.

SandForce has announced a new family of solid-state disk (SSD) processors that the company claims will allow lower-cost, commodity NAND flash memory to be used in data center operations. The disks will also be faster and more reliable for use in mobile applications, the company said.

The Japanese government will lift punitive tariffs on computer chips South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor makes, leading to a settlement of a three-year-old trade dispute between the two countries, Kyodo News reported Monday, citing Finance Ministry officials.

"There's still a general freeze on hiring, but we're seeing a shortage in our research and development department, and will need hundreds of employees there," said PH Chang, VP for human resources at TSMC.

Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing has announced the results of its 27-for-10 rights offering, the subscription period of which ended on April 6, 2009. The rights offering was oversubscribed with applications totaling approximately 144% of the offering size. The rights offering will strengthen its capital position.

Japan's subsidies for home solar panels have attracted far fewer applicants than planned, industry data showed on Wednesday, underscoring the likelihood of bold government steps to promote solar power.

Micron Technology has announced that it intends to offer, subject to market and other considerations, common stock and convertible senior notes for total aggregate gross proceeds of approximately US$450 million. The company said these offerings will be used for general corporate purposes, including working capital, capital expenditures, and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions.

Qualcomm is looking at South Korean wireless and healthcare technology firms for possible investment, Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs told Reuters on Wednesday.

Although solar module makers are trying to get rid of excess inventory, the price of conventional home solar systems remains somewhat unfazed because of other factors, like declining subsidies.

KLA-Tencor has introduced the TeraScanXR, bringing high-resolution reticle-, aerial-, and wafer-plane inspection capability to the 32-nm node.

Japan slipped from the number two position in the world as of the end of 2008 in grid-connected existing solar photovoltaic capacity, replaced by Spain, according to a recent study by an international body.

Applied Materials said on Monday the value of a sales agreement to supply solar production equipment to a private buyer has been slashed to US$250 million from US$1.9 billion due a worsening global economy.

As per Taiwan labor law, we issued documents on April 3 to over 200 former employees certifying that their employment was terminated due to deteriorating business conditions.

Elpida's loss widened to an estimated 160 billion yen (US$1.59 billion) from 23.5 billion yen in the previous financial year, the Nikkei said, without citing anyone.

...In the long run, they say, there will be only three viable entities, at least at the leading edge of chipmaking: Samsung in memory chips, Intel in microprocessors and TSMC in foundries. The rest will be "nationalistic" ventures in need of regular government bail-outs.

Powerchip Semiconductor Corp., Taiwan's biggest memory-chip maker, is seeking to revise terms on US$157.9 million of debt a week after smaller rival ProMOS Technologies won acceptance to buy back debt at a discount.

"We're interested in finding somthing that really makes sense for us," said Micron Technology CEO Steve Appleton, who sees no compelling reason to join in the Taiwanese government's plan to aid its struggling memory chip industry.

Taiwan Memory Co., keen on securing technology from foreign chip makers, is looking to forge an alliance with Micron Technology on top of a partnership announced Wednesday with Elpida Memory, but a three-way tie-up may be complicated and won't provide meaningful benefits, say analysts.

Elpida Memory said Thursday it is considering offering an approximately 10% stake in the company to Taiwan Memory Co., the memory-chip firm being created by the Taiwanese government. The Japanese DRAM chipmaker hasn't decided on the amount of the stake in monetary terms, the timing or how it would be offered.

It's no secret that IBM is outsourcing US jobs. Last year, IBM's US employment fell 5%, while emerging market employment rose 15%, particularly in high growth markets like India, China, Brazil and Russia.

Some are suggesting it's time to buy beaten-down solar stocks, while others are arguing there's value because bad news is priced in and good news is starting to emerge. Wall Street analysts, often criticized for being blindly bullish on stocks, are this time among the sector's staunchest bears.

The Chinese government alerted all silicon, ingot, wafer, cell, and panel manufactures that it intends to announced a very aggressive Solar subsidy that is equivalent to US$3 per installed watt, in cash, as an incentive to aid the Chinese population to install solar. The Japanese may soon follow suit with an announcement of a substantial subsidy for solar installation.