Asian chip stocks such as Samsung Electronics and Toshiba eased on Wednesday following a broker downgrade of the sector, keeping a lid on regional markets.

Hynix said Tuesday it has no plan to raise $1 billion in the equity markets as reported by the Financial Times earlier in the day.

ASML has won support from its unionized workforce for 24-hour, seven days-a-week production during market peaks as a result of a flexible labor model centered around a three-year time bank for employees.

The legal war between Rambus and the rest of the chip industry flared up again Tuesday, when the company was accused of intentionally shredding documents that cast doubts on the validity of some of its patents.

Hynix Semiconductor Inc., the world's second-biggest maker of memory chips, may sell new shares to fund future capital expenditure although it has no firm plan yet, company officials said on Tuesday.

IBM scientists claim the smallest, high-quality line patterns ever made using deep-ultraviolet (DUV, 193nm) optical lithography - immersion-style, of course, but with a high index liquid rather than water.

Infineon Technologies is sticking to its plans to pull out of the volatile memory-chip business despite shareholder grumbles and signaled Thursday that it would prefer to list the business separately outside Germany

Micron plans to use the Nampa, Idaho, facility to produce image sensor chips for cell-phone cameras, one of the company's fast-growing businesses at the heart of a plan to diversify from commodity DRAM memory chips.

Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., China's second-largest supplier of customized chips, will delay its initial share sale for a third time, postponing the offering until next year as the company is not yet profitable.

ST Microelectronics (ST) plans to build a US$500 million chip testing, marking and packing (TMP)

The NSR-S609B, an ArF immersion scanner with the industry's first hyper-NA projection lens of NA 1.07, shipped in January to a major IC manufacturer

orth American-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.26 billion in orders in January 2006 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.97

..TES brings both hardware and software component libraries to the application. The hardware acceleration component consists of the Display Controller and Accelerated Vector Engine (D/AVE) providing increased hardware graphics display performance. ..

ISi last month announced AMD as a new customer, with AMD contracting to purchase a Z-RAM embedded memory full technology license for potential use in its future microprocessor products....

Merrill Lynch upgraded shares of ATI Technologies to "buy" from "neutral" and said the recent launch of the R580 bolsters the graphics chipmaker's high-performance lineup just as shares of rival Nvidia appear to be losing steam....

It blamed a 50 percent jump in the price of silicon, the main ingredient in solar panels used to generate electricity, and forecast further rises of 15 to 20 percent in 2006...

...The technique manipulates light energy and wave patterns to reveal subtle behavior, such as correlated oscillations of two objects....

...This funding will provide long-term financial support for ongoing process and product development, as we continue to execute upon our strategy of partnering with leading global materials, printing and product application companies."

Sales in the automotive, industrial and multimarket unit will rise in the year ending in September, and the ``operative profit margin'' will ``be at least at the level of the previous year or even better, Infineon said.