NewSight Corp of the US developed a 3D display using LEDs as pixels for the first time in the world.

"The sector is in a dire situation," said Toshiba Senior Executive Vice President Masashi Muromachi. "Sales prices tumbled 40 percent or so in the first half and they are falling faster than expected in the second half." Muromachi also said that World Semiconductor Trade Statistics's revised forecast for 6.5% growth in global sales of semiconductors in 2010 was still high.

AMD spinnoff, The Foundry Company. has been given the green light by New York state's economic development arm, which has approved US$1.2 billion in state incentives for the firm's new chip fab.

Plummeting demand for computer chips is affecting IT centers around the globe. The eastern German state of Saxony is one of the areas trying to survive a year that experts are already calling a disaster.

Hynix Semiconductor said on Tuesday it would delay the planned sale of a stake in its Chinese joint venture to partner Numonyx by one year. South Korea-based Hynix had planned to sell a stake worth US$100 million to Numonyx as the latter sought to boost its control over the Chinese chip plant. It already sold half the stake and was supposed to sell the rest by the end of this year.

"We will discuss with our controlling shareholders to decide on a loan if necessary," Park Hyun, a spokesman for Ichon, South Korea-based Hynix, said by telephone Monday. Park said details such as the amount, timing and method haven't been determined.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

PhotonStar LED Ltd has demonstrated a prototype luminaire with high efficiency and high Ra of 96 at 2700K, and a tunable white color temperature range of 2500K to 10,000K.

The ruling is a victory for defendants Qualcomm, Motorola, Spansion, STMicroelectronics NV, Freescale Semiconductor and ATI Technologies, a company purchased in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices. The commission's administrative law judge found that the two Tessera patents were valid, but weren't infringed by the defendants. "It's a great result," said Alex Rogers, Qualcomm's senior vice president and legal counsel.

The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy. The last two recessions (1990-1991 and 2001) lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year, according to the NBER. The current recession is one of the longest downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

German chip maker Qimonda, which is majority-owned by Infineon, needs a helping hand. Its memory chips are struggling in an oversupplied market, and the firm is burning cash at a rate of $250.0 million per quarter. Investors have deserted the company, while Infineon is desperately trying to offload as much of its stake as possible. If current talks with potential investors fail, the company faces a cash crisis in the next few months.

Taiwan stocks opened 0.55 percent lower on Monday, pulling back from a more than two-week closing high, as tech shares fell after a Hon Hai subsidiary said it would cut staff in Hungary and industry sources said TSMC aimed to cut costs by 20 percent.