Texas Instruments (TI) announced it has shipped nearly 6.5 billion units of copper wire bonding technology in its analog, embedded processing and wireless products. This milestone underscores TI's confidence in copper as a viable replacement to gold in its semiconductor product roadmaps.

Revenues for core semiconductor components used in mobile handsets, including platform ICs and wireless connectivity ICs, are expected to reach almost US$37 billion per annum in 2012.

With the investment from Intel Capital, Trigence Semiconductor will expand integration of Dnote to computing devices including Intel architecture-based PCs, Ultrabook and smartphones, and also expects to expand its LSI and licensing businesses.

Its semiconductor unit ATIC had an accumulated deficit of 4.1 billion dirhams (US$1.12 billion)as of the end of 2011 and made losses in the past two years, Mubadala said in the filing. "No assurance is given that ATIC will be profitable in 2012 or in subsequent years," Mubadala said.

Altair Semiconductor has released a cost and feature-optimized chipset tailored for the Indian TD-LTE market, which is expected to become one of the fastest-growing LTE markets in the world.

Toshiba has announced that it will rebuild its semiconductor manufacturing operations in Thailand by relocating Toshiba Semiconductor Thailand to a new manufacturing facility.

China's Hony Capital plans to sell or outsource the operations at Elpida Memory's Hiroshima DRAM plant to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) if its bid for the bankrupt Japanese chipmaker is successful, the Nikkei business daily said on Tuesday.

At its Fab 8 campus in New York, Globalfoundries has begun installation of a special set of production tools to create TSVs in semiconductor wafers processed on the company's leading-edge 20nm technology platform.

More companies are being linked to the Indian government's plan to get one or more semiconductor wafer fabs constructed on the sub-continent. At least five chip companies have expressed an interest in supporting the project, according to a Hindu Business Line report.

RF chip maker TriQuint Semiconductor cut about 70 jobs in Florida last week after issuing a disappointing quarterly report and sales forecast, according to a report by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Samsung Electronics has announced revenues of 45.27 trillion Korean won on a consolidated basis for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012, a 22-percent increase year-on-year.

Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor said that its first-quarter loss narrowed from last year as the company cut costs in the face of declining revenue.

ASML dropped the most in six months after Europe's biggest semiconductor equipment maker didn't provide guidance for future orders in its first-quarter results.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will offer only one process at the 20nm node, a change from the multiple processes that the foundry giant has offered customers for the past several nodes, said Shang-yi Chiang, company executive VP and co-COO.

Barclays Capital is raising its total lithography units forecast by more than 10 systems, from 234 to 251 in 2012. As many as 260 litho tools could be purchased for semiconductor manufacturing, as foundries are seeing high demand for 28nm chips.

Although only 2% growth was registered in the worldwide semiconductor market in 2011, several companies posted results that were far different, according to IC Insights.

The global semiconductor materials market increased 7% in 2011 compared to 2010, with record revenues in 2011 of US$47.86 billion.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has unveiled a new plant in the mountains of central Taiwan - not to make computer chips, but tea.

Hynix Semiconductor has submitted an initial proposal to bid for Elpida Memory, the Japanese chipmaker that filed for bankruptcy last month. Hiynix said in a regulatory filing that it will decide whether to make a final bid after due diligence.

Dialog Semiconductor has announced it is working closely with TSMC to develop its next generation of bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology specifically tailored to high-performance power management ICs (PMICs) for portable devices.

InvenSense has announced dual-source capability for its CMOS-MEMS supply from the two leading semiconductor foundries in the world.

Globalfoundres announced that its Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany has shipped a quarter of a million semiconductor wafers based on 32nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology. The milestone represents a significant lead over other foundries in HKMG manufacturing, it claimed.

Chang-Sik Choi, former executive vice president of Samsung Electronics, has been named president and CEO while Chan-Hee Lee, former executive vice president of MagnaChip Semiconductor, has been named president in charge of Dongbu HiTek's foundry business.

Hynix Semiconductor said the chip industry is set to recover from the second half of this year as the prices of DRAM chips have been rebounding following news of Japanese chip maker Elpida Memory's bankruptcy protection filing late last month.

Brite Semiconductor, Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) and ARM have jointly announced the first tape out of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore test chip using SMIC's 40nm low leakage process technology.

Clearly, this action tends to cast doubt on the validity of all future data published by WSTS. That sort of uncertainty has a huge ripple effect. It will impact chip companies doing planning and forecasting, market research analysts who depend on WSTS numbers - interpret them and predict market trends, and broad-spectrum media outlets.

The US Supreme Court Tuesday refused to consider a Hynix Semiconductor appeal that argued Rambus shouldn't be able to enforce certain patents because it misled an organization that sets industry-wide standards for computer memory chips.

Hynix Semiconductor said Thursday a US court has ruled in its favor in an antitrust claim filed by Rambus against the South Korean chipmaker.

Applied Materials reached the highest in more than eight months after predicting higher profit than estimated, signaling that semiconductor makers are pulling out of a spending slump.

Hynix Semiconductor jumped to an eight-month high in Seoul trading after Hyundai Securities said contract prices for DRAM chips increased and as financing delays at Japan's Elpida Memory raised the prospect of less competition.

Atomic Precision Systems (APS), a little-known semiconductor equipment vendor specializing in deposition technology, has filed a patent infringement suit against Intel, IBM and Micron Technology claiming that they willfully infringed on an atomic layer deposition (ALD) patent held by APS, according to a statement issued by the company's law firm Tuesday.

MagnaChip Semiconductor has announced its 0.35um mixed-signal process is in production for MEMS accelerometer applications.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to announce 3D IC assembly service as a general offering at the beginning of 2013, according to Maria Marced, president of TSMC Europe.

MagnaChip Semiconductor announced that its Korean subsidiary has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Dawin Electronics, a privately held semiconductor company that designs and manufactures Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT), Fast Recovery Diode (FRD) and MOSFET modules.

Foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has hit back at analysts who have said it has yield problems with its 28nm CMOS manufacturing processes.

Leading electronic equipment manufacturers remained the center of the semiconductor world in 2011, accounting for US$105.6 billion of semiconductors on a design total available market basis - 35% of semiconductor vendors' worldwide chip revenue, according to Gartner.

Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML said Wednesday it expects a healthy start to 2012, as its customers invest in chip production to drive faster and more powerful smartphones and tablets.

Apple confirmed Wednesday that it has acquired Israeli semiconductor company Anobit technologies for US$390 million, providing it with significant technological boost in the mobile devices market.

MStar Semiconductor has announced support for Intel WiDi on their Smart TV platform.