The head of Nokia's small, but highly profitable patent licensing division is leaving after two years in the role, the Finnish company said on Wednesday, weeks after he sealed a pace-setting patent deal with Samsung Electronics.

It could be related to reports of exploding batteries.

Slow overall chip market growth, rising cost, diminished venture capital investments in the semiconductor industry, and cheap interest rates are among the reasons tempting chip vendors to keep buying.

Facebook announced Friday that humans would no longer write descriptions for its Trending topics list, handing over even more responsibility to the already-powerful algorithm. But just days after the policy change, Facebook's algorithm chose a very bad, factually incorrect headline to explain to its news-hungry users why Megyn Kelly was trending.

More than 95% of the microchip designer's investors voted in favour of the deal at a meeting in London

Despite first- and second-generation High Bandwidth Memory having made few appearances in shipping products, Samsung and Hynix are already working on a followup: HBM3.

ON Semiconductor has agreed to sell its ignition IGBT power device business to Littelfuse for $104 million to allow its acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor to go ahead.

Apple has been sued by owners of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones who say a design defect causes the phones' touchscreens to become unresponsive, making them unusable

With so many iPhones in use, the combination of replacement sales, adjunct sales (such as its Watch, which currently needs an iPhone to function) and services - its newest focus - has enough momentum to keep Apple profitable.

The Taiwan government has appointed Audrey Tang, a transgender software developer and self-described "civic hacker," to its executive council to head digital policy.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has published a patent application from Apple titled "Electronic Devices with Sapphire-Coated Substrates." The invention is designed to add a sapphire coating to future OLED displays like those that will begin shipping in 2017 and beyond.

Images posted on Baidu show a Galaxy Note 7 which cannot be more than two weeks old, black and burnt, in the aftermath of the explosion.

Apple's iOS devices like iPhones and iPads crashed twice as often in the second quarter compared to the previous one, new data shows.

The chip, called Piton, would "substantially increase processing speed while slashing energy usage."

Intel's recent pledge to expand its business making chips for others highlights its ambition to snatch chip orders for Apple's popular iPhones from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. as early as 2018, industry experts said.

Phase change memory has a lot to recommend it as a long-term replacement for DRAM - it's fast, it can retain data for long periods of time, and Intel's Optane/3DXPoint is thought to be partially based on phase change memory technology.

Orders for semiconductor-manufacturing equipment are picking up at seven major Japanese producers, underpinned by brisk demand for 3D memory and ravenous investment in chip miniaturization.

One97 Communications, which runs mobile payment and ecommerce platform Paytm, is in advanced talks to raise fresh funding of about Rs 2,000 crore ($300 million) from Taiwanese semiconductor maker MediaTek, Goldman Sachs, Singapore's Temasek and other investors, according to two persons with knowledge of the development.

Apple may need to contend with a supply shortage of the soon-to-be-released new model of its iPhone during the first round of the rollout, due to problems with faulty components, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned.

Few companies enjoy the kind of dominance Intel does in chips for the computers found in data centers. But competitors keep trying to pry open its server stronghold, with IBM the latest to brandish a new tool.

Better-than-expected demand for Samsung Electronics' new Galaxy Note 7 is causing supply constraints globally, the South Korean tech giant said on Wednesday, suggesting strong initial sales for the new premium smartphone.

After the unprecedented breach of hacking tools and exploits stolen from the US National Security Agency's elite hacking unit, some privacy advocates see it as clear vindication of Apple in its fight with the FBI earlier this year.

Lenovo's stature in the mobile market is shaky, having recently experienced a 33% decline in sales-again, thanks to those other rising stars in China. However, it could still bounce back, and is therefore an important win for Microsoft.

Apple accounted for 75% of the smartphone industry's profits in the second quarter, but that's down from more than 90% a year ago due to Samsung's Galaxy device lineup, according to Canaccord Genuity.

One way Apple will aim to keep the "iPhone 7" competitive is the addition of new fast-charge technology, according to one rumor.

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f22852f8-549e-11e6-9664-e0bdc13c3bef.html#ixzz4IEwuqbQI Ahead of the ARM deal, SoftBank had sold $20bn worth of its most valuable assets, including shares in Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba, Finnish game developer Supercell and Japan's GungHo Online Entertainment.

As the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus approach their second birthday, a growing number of users are suffering from what appears to be a latent manufacturing issue that presents as a gray flickering bar at the top of the screen and a display that's unresponsive or less responsive to touch.

Samsung Electronics is slated to hold a foundry forum in China later this month (August 2016) to attract Chinese fabless firms amid its growing idle foundry lines, industry experts said on Tuesday.

Samsung Electronics plans to launch a program to sell refurbished used versions of its premium smartphones as early as 2017, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Xiaomi is preparing to enter the US smartphone market "in the near future," employing the same online sales and social media marketing tactics that helped the six-year-old startup become China's largest privately funded startup.

China's Tsinghua Unigroup, which has been active in overseas semiconductor investment, is eyeing small and mid-sized South Korean chip firms with specialty solutions, a local report has said.

Applied Materials on Thursday said orders reached another record high in its third quarter, following a 15-year high the previous three months, as profit surged, stirring hope for robust results in coming quarters.

Japan's Renesas Electronics is in the final stages of negotiations to acquire US chipmaker Intersil for as much as JPY300 billion ($2.99 billion), the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday.

Specifications for DDR5 memory will be released this year, and deployment of the DRAM will begin in 2020, according to a slide deck presented at the Intel Developer Forum this week.

Qualcomm needs to help Xiaomi to grow beyond its Android phone business model. It's time Xiaomi makes Snapdragon-powered Windows phones.

Cypress Semiconductor led until recently by one of the chip industry's elder statesmen, settled on a much younger successor who started in another field.