Japan's Toshiba plans to take a 100% stake in its struggling LCD joint venture with Panasonic, a source with knowledge of the matter said. Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology, currently owned 60 percent by Toshiba and 40 percent by Panasonic, is the world's second-largest maker of small and midsized LCD panels used in cell phones, car navigation systems and other devices.

Japan's Toshiba and Sharp has said they are considering working together in the solar power business amid growing demand for cleaner energy, sending their shares higher.

oshiba has become the latest Japanese company to sweep away its top management as red ink floods businesses' accounts and analysts warn of a two-year crisis in Asia's technology sector.

Three years ago, as head of Toshiba's (TSBAa.BE) power business, Norio Sasaki orchestrated the tech conglomerate's $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse's nuclear-power-plant business. Now, as Sasaki prepares to take over the president's post, he will have to show the same willingness to take chances as he tries to help overhaul the company after its biggest-ever expected annual loss.

Toshiba said on Tuesday it planned to start production of solid-state drives (SSD) overseas to cut costs and increase output, beginning assembly in the Philippines by the middle of the year. The Nikkei business daily reported Toshiba aimed to generate 100 billion yen ($1 billion) in SSD sales in the year starting April 2010, more than 10 times the current figure.

At the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference last year, AMD's Bruno La Fontaine revealed the IBM Alliance's Typhoon, a 45nm full-field test chip using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the first metal level. With that project finished the middle of last year, the alliance — including IBM, AMD, Toshiba and other partners — decided to kick it up a notch. "We were going to move on to 32nm, but technology is moving so fast, if we spent our time on that, we would never get to 16nm, which is where EUV will be used..."

Japan's government is fortifying its defense of the corporate sector by broadening sources of public funding for companies struggling to cope with the deepening recession. Goldman Sachs analysts in a report Friday identified 15 Japanese technology companies on their financial risk watch list.

The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) workgroup was created in May of 2006 to standardize the low-level interface to NAND flash chips from different manufacturers. However, the two largest NAND flash manufacturers are not members of ONFI. Samsung and Toshiba together account for approximately 70% of global NAND flash production, although their market share has been dropping by around 10% annually since ONFI was first standardized. SanDisk is also notably absent from the list of members.

Japan's chip industry, awash in red ink, plans to consolidate older fabs. Fujitsu, NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology all detailed scheduled closings of older facilities. Also, executives at NEC and Toshiba, which have been discussing a merger of their system-on-chip (SoC) operations, appeared reluctant to go ahead with a merger until internal restructuring efforts take effect.

The ThinkEquity Partners' report centered on SanDisk, which is not one of the four companies Apple actually buys its memory components from (Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba and Micron). However, the report says Apple's voracious appetite for flash RAM is affecting the entire market.

Fujitsu and Toshiba has announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on the transfer of Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. The companies plan to conclude a transfer contract at an early date, and aim to complete the transaction in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

Toshiba has developed a higher capacity version of its FeRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) memory that can send and receive data at eight times the speed of its previously detailed prototype.

Toshiba is planning to allow a total of about 16,700 workers to take on second jobs while they are on temporary leave due to production cuts in its struggling semiconductor and LCD divisions, company officials said Thursday.

Asian stocks fell for the first time in four days, led by banks and technology companies, as a record slump in Japanese factory production and lower profit forecasts renewed concern the global slowdown is deepening.

The technology industry suffered another black day yesterday (January 30) as a host of big names including NEC and Hitachi, said they would make large losses in the year to March. Toshiba and NEC Electronics warned they would incur losses in the year to March. Even star performer Nintendo cut its profit forecast.

Toshiba is in talks to merge part of its chip operations with the semiconductor unit of NEC, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said, as they struggle with slumping demand and prices.

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba has confirmed it is in talks to buy Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) arm. The Nikkei business daily said any deal between Fujitsu and Toshiba would be worth 30bn-40bn yen ($340m-$450m; £233m-£308m).

The palm-sized device in a larger 500GB capacity is on sale from various online retailers now for around £120.

Toshiba, a company best known for making laptops and consumer electronics, on Monday said that it will enter the solar-photovoltaics business. Toshiba's photovoltaics business will be part of the conglomerate's Transmission Distribution & Industrial Systems business, which makes equipment for natural-gas power plants.

Mainstream SSD drives tend to be limited to 80 GB or less for affordability. There are drives that have larger capacities, but the cost is significantly higher than a similar HDD, which is what is keeping SSD drives out of the hands of many at this point. Despite this, capacities are ramping up fast!

Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida on Friday called on the government to prepare a safety net for unemployed workers as companies are forced to carry out aggressive layoffs to combat the economic storm. "Assuming a certain degree (of downturn) in business cycles, the government needs to prepare a safety net in terms of employment."

Toshiba will likely delay the construction of a new memory chip plant in western Japan by half a year due to slow progress in land acquisition, the Nikkei business daily said, citing President Atsutoshi Nishida.

With flash memory scaling coming under increasingly sharp questioning, Toshiba (Tokyo) researchers said they have developed a double tunnel layer technology for SONOS-type memories that could be scaled to the 10 nm generation. At the 2007 IEDM, Toshiba presented a SONOS-type memory with a 1.2 nm silicon nanocrystal layer capable of supporting 100 Gb densities at the 15 nm generation.

Toshiba has announced a cost-effective 32nm CMOS platform technology, which allows to halve the cost per function from 45nm technology. The platform was achieved by application of advanced single exposure lithography and gate-first metal gate/high-K process technology. This technology enables a 0.124m(2) SRAM cell and a gate density of 3,650 gate/mm(2). The platform technology is based on a 32nm process technology developed jointly with NEC Electronics.

Toshiba says it will debut a 512GB solid state hard drive during the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.