LTX-Credence has terminated plans to buy Verigy after accepting a US$15 million payment to end the agreement. The termination fee was received March 25, LTX-Credence said in a statement.

SanDisk expects tablet sales will increase from 17 million units in 2010 to nearly 205 million units by 2014. The firm also estimates the flash based storage per device (SSD storage) will more than triple during the same period from 31 Gb/unit in 2010 to 96 Gb/unit in 2014.

The death toll from Japan's 11 March earthquake and tsunami has passed 10,000, police say. More than 17,440 people are listed as missing, and 2,775 as injured.

[Apple's] focus this week has been to troubleshoot all the iPad 2s that customers are returning to the stores. One iPad came back with a post it note on it that said "Wife said no..."

iPhone and Android are already flooding past corporate gate keepers, and current BlackBerry users are looking to make the leap to these newer devices. Recent Nielsen surveys show that BlackBerry users covet iPhones and Androids. These new devices are the most desired smartphones for every demographic group that Nielsen studied.

Finnish labor unions are afraid that Nokia's move could cost thousands of jobs since many employees in the company are responsible for developing Symbian-related businesses.

ZTE says it will quadruple the number of smartphones it ships globally to 12 million this year, including its first model for a top-tier wireless provider in the US Huawei, which already provides a smartphone to the smaller prepaid providers, said it is in talks with the four national carriers.

Google has closed availability of the source code to Android 3.0 Honeycomb, explaining that the tablet-oriented software was not ready for use on smartphones and that the company didn't want outside developers or enthusiasts experimenting with it in unauthorized ways.

Citigroup analyst Timothy Arcuri asserted in a research note that that FormFactor has received a "major order" from Elpida Memory for wafer probe cards.

Iwate Toshiba Electronics will start to ramp-up production lines from March 28. However, Toshiba Mobile Display (Saitama Pref.), a wholly-owned subsidiary and manufacturer of mid- and small-sized LCD displays, expects to take about a month to secure recovery of its manufacturing line. Toshiba has started to supply some products alternatively from the Ishikawa Works, the company's another production facility located in Ishikawa Pref..

Provisional estimates released by the World Bank put the economic damage resulting from the disaster at as much as US$235 billion, around 4% of GDP. That figure would make this disaster the costliest since comparable records began in 1965.

The effects of the earthquake and tsunami have thrown a shadow over Japan's exports. Exports rose 9% in February 2011 from a year earlier, but those figures don't reflect the impact from the earthquake which hit on March 11.

Toyota Motors, the word's biggest carmaker, will slow production at some of its factories in North America due to a shortage of parts. Toyota has already halted production at all of its 12 assembly plants in Japan until 26 March.

Motorola Mobility, which has been Google's only major licensee fully committed to Android, is now developing a new web-based OS intended to give it more control over its future, enraging Android advocates anew just weeks after Nokia opted for WP7 platform

Renesas Electronics has resumed operations at the factory sites in Aomori and Yamagata prefectures, northern Japan. The facilities were shut down following a massive earthquake and resulting tsunami on March 11.

Micron Technology is trying to secure its supply of crucial silicon wafers following Japan's devastating earthquake and said it was too soon to gauge the disaster's impact on its business.

Nokia may be moving toward Windows Phone, but with the T-Mobile Astound (C7), it shows that with a few needed upgrades, Symbian can still function as a good entry-level smartphone.

Globalfoundries expects revenues to rise at least 14% to more than US$4 billion in 2011, and aims to overtake United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) of Taiwan to be the world's second-largest contract chipmaker by revenues, CEO Douglas Grose said in an interview.