Texas Instruments has announced it would sell a multi-tranche debt offering to partially fund its merger with National Semiconductor.

"In the near term, both companies should benefit by cross-selling their products to largely non-overlapping customer bases," writes Linley Gwennap with The Linley Group. "For the longer term, the acquisition gives Nvidia an opportunity to expand the market for "Tegra" by developing single-chip products that combine the application and baseband processors."

The consumer confidence index fell to 33.1 in April 2011, down from 38.6 in March, according to the Cabinet Office. A reading below 50 suggests consumer pessimism.

Canadian Solar Inc.'s first-quarter profit soared as shipments jumped and gross margins expanded, although the bottom line missed analysts expectations as silicon costs increased and the company recorded a derivatives loss.

Toshiba is near an agreement to buy Landis+Gyr, a Swiss electronic-metering company, for more than US$2 billion, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus' breakthrough technologies available for licensing with complementary technologies from CRI that include patented innovations and solutions for content protection, network security, anti-counterfeiting and financial services.

A US appeals court found memory chip designer Rambus Inc was wrong to shred hundreds of boxes of documents relevant in two patent infringement lawsuits it filed, sending its shares down sharply.

Cisco Systems is expected to cut thousands of jobs in possibly its worst-ever round of layoffs to meet CEO John Chambers' goal of slashing costs by US$1 billion, according to analysts.

The 30 new jobs come in addition to the previously announced 300 engineers and technicians positions that Samsung Austin Semiconductor is hiring in the first six months of 2011.

Thousands of people have spent the night outdoors in the southern Spanish town of Lorca after an earthquake which killed at least eight people.

Manosha Karunatilaka, a former account manager at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), pleaded guilty to charges that he participated in an insider trading scheme tied to Primary Global Research, an expert network firm.

Consumer solid-state drives will have a break-out year in 2012 due to falling prices, which will make SSDs a primary storage option for mainstream users, Gartner said.

Mosaid Technologies has commenced patent infringement litigation against Elpida Memory of Japan. Two other companies, Buffalo and Axiontech, are also named as defendants in the suit.