"The joint venture is evaluating plans for operations over the holiday season, including a possible stoppage of some production lines," a SanDisk spokesman said Friday. "We constantly consider manufacturing schedules in light of market requirements and this is particularly true during the holiday season," he added. This follows a Bloomberg report that said Toshiba is considering a "partial stoppage" of flash memory production in Japan over the holidays.

"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.

Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.

Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba is considering delaying construction of two new domestic chip plants amid slowing demand and falling prices, Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday.

oshiba, the largest Japanese chip maker, reported a quarterly loss Wednesday as the global economic slowdown aggravated a glut in the market for chips used to store data in consumer electronics, helping drive down memory prices. The net loss was ¥26.8 billion, or about US$275 million, in the three months that ended September 30, compared with a ¥25 billion profit a year earlier, the Tokyo-based company said. Sales fell 7%to ¥1.88 trillion.

Toshiba said at a symposium that its 40nm and 45nm process technologies are ready and that the company has moved into "pilot line" production for those fabrication processors. However, Toshiba's main customer, Sony Computer Entertainment, has not yet designed 40nm or 45nm versions of its chips that are used inside Sony PlayStation 3 video game system.

Japan's Toshiba is in talks to buy US chip maker Spansion, two industry sources said, in the latest sign of pressure for consolidation in the struggling memory sector. However, Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said his company was not in talks to buy Spansion, and was also not considering such a move.

and Matsushita Electric Industrial will become the first Japanese companies to mass produce organic electroluminescent, or OEL, display panels, the Nikkei newspaper reported, without saying where it obtained the information. Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology, 60 percent owned by Toshiba and 40 percent by Matsushita, plans to produce 1 million 2.5 inch (6.3 centimeter) panels per month for use with devices such as mobile phones and car navigation systems beginning in the northern hemisphere's autumn of next year, the report said

...In order to beat their Korean rivals and regain past glory as global leaders in the display segment, leading Japanese display makers recently formed a united front with support from the Japanese government. Sony, Sharp, Toshiba and Panasonic joined forces in the development of technology for the mass production of larger-sized AM OLED panels over 40 inches financed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The Japanese government is backing Sony, Toshiba, Sharp and some other companies in joint research of new display technology called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLED.

Toshiba plans to stop production of filament lamps in 2010 and move towards eco-friendly lighting

...the processor will also enable users to use hand gesture controls to start, pause and rewind your entertainment, upscale DVDs from standard to high-definition and find certain parts of movies with face indexing. The downside is power consumption. The SE1000 is rated at a maximum power consumption of 20 watts, which is considerable in today’s notebook world. Pricing of the F50 (a 15.4” notebook that will include a GPS module) and the G50 (18.4”) are expected to begin in the $2500 and top out and well above $3000.