Samsung Electronics won a US trade ruling in its efforts to block imports of flash-memory chips made by Spansion. Shares of Spansion fell after the close of regular-hours trading.

Although more flash production capacity is coming online, SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra downplayed the risk that oversupply will hurt prices this year.

"We are excited to complete the transition to the next generation 2Xnm NAND components which reiterates our strategy of producing high performance SSDs at the most attractive price point available for consumer applications," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.

The profit gain was largely due to "a significantly improved performance in electronic devices, driven mainly by the return to profit of the LCD business and demand expansion in NAND flash memories," Toshiba said in a statement.

Flash memory specialist SanDisk topped Wall Street's estimates with its fourth-quarter results, boosted by strength in Asia and its mobile business.

The upgrade reflects improving 2011 prospects for NAND flash memory demand, driven by tablets, smartphones and solid-state drives. The improving demand picture offsets concerns about higher supply due to new NAND fabs from Samsung, Toshiba and Micron expanding production in 2011.

Micron says some flash controller jobs are going to migrate down stack towards the NAND chips, freeing up controller manufacturers from chip-dependent work they shouldn't be doing. It sees low-level flash controllers developing and taking on error management, taking this job away from existing NAND controllers.

ASML now expects fourth-quarter bookings to be above two billion euro. "NAND flash memory investments for the high volume ramp of new technologies and foundry/logic commitments for new strategic fab projects are driving brisk lithography demand for 2011..."

Intellectual Ventures has filed patent lawsuits against nine tech companies. The first lawsuit targets software security vendors Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Check Point. The second lawsuit targets DRAM and flash memory vendors Hynix and Elpida. The third names FPGA vendors Altera, Lattice and Microsemi, which recently acquired Actel and its FPGA business.

Shares of SanDisk jumped Monday after a Robert W. Baird analyst upgraded the stock, projecting better prices for the company's flash memory cards heading into next year. The analyst even predicted there could be NAND shortages in the second half of 2011.

This new investment round was led by Intel Capital and includes new funding from strategic investors and Anobit's current investors. Anobit is a provider of NAND-based products and systems ranging from embedded flash controllers to enterprise-class SSD.

The sale of new tablet PCs and smartphones with solid-state storage technology is compensating for weak demand for memory cards and USB flash drives, and has led to a 17% quarter-to-quarter increase in NAND flash shipments and an average price drop of about 9%.

The complete Spansion SPI product portfolio now spans densities from 4Mb through 256Mb.

NOR flash supplier Spansion has named Saied Tehrani as senior vice president of research and development. Tehrani joins Spansion from Everspin Technologies, a supplier of MRAMs, where he was founder and chief operating officer.

Toshiba's operating profits for the April-September period is set to come to more than 100 billion yen (US$1.2 billion), beating the company's forecast of 70 billion yen, according to the Nikkei business daily. Booming global sales of smartphones have boosted demand for the company's flash memory chips and small LCD panels.

RIM retaliates on Steve Job's recent knock on the Blackberry maker."For those of us who live outside of Apple's distortion field, we know that 7-inch tablets will be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support matters to customers who want a real web experience," said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

The Nikkei business daily recently reported that the resistive random access memory chip to be developed by Elpida and Sharp could write data 10,000 times faster than NAND flash memory technology, while consuming less power. The next-generation memory chip is expected to be commercialized around 2013.

OCZ Technology is teaming up with SandForce to deliver exceptional new SSD products that leverage SATA3 and cost-effective NAND flash components. OCZ is set to begin sample distribution to current and potential clients in the fourth quarter of 2010, with mass production beginning in the first quarter of 2011.

Adesto Technologies, a memory startup funded by Applied Materials and others, is readying its first conductive-bridging random access memory (CBRAM) product. CBRAM is seen as a potential candidate to replace conventional flash memory. Other candidates include FRAM, MRAM, phase-change and RRAM.

In a nutshell, DRAM suffers from data and power concerns, NAND flash is plagued by reliability issues, and system integration is becoming more complex...

The analyst do not expect a meaningful acceleration in enterprise SSD adoption in 2010, but his analysis suggests as system availability improves in the second half of 2010, shipments are set to grow dramatically in 2011.

Violin Memory has introduced a 40TB capacity flash memory array for enterprises that uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND and costs less than US$16 per GB.

Pliant Technology has introduced a new family of lower-cost, higher-capacity solid state drives (SSD) based on consumer-grade NAND flash memory but built for data center use.

Globalfoundries and Freescale Semiconductor have jointly announced plans to bring a new class of thin film storage (TFS) flash memory products to market on 90nm technology.

Start-up Fusion-io has snagged Dell as an OEM for its ioDrive PCIe flash card accelerators.

Verigy, which makes products that test flash memory, high-speed computer memory chips and SoC devices, previously posted seven straight quarters of red ink, though recent losses had narrowed.

Spansion on August 6 filed three complaints against Samsung, alleging patent violations in a broad range of Samsung flash memory products that go into devices like tablets and smartphones. A Spansion spokesman declined to comment on which products those may be. However, Apple's iPad and iPhone 4 use Samsung flash memory.

"Apple and other OEMs have procured large volumes of flash, which has forced others to double book in order to get some of the allocation. This action cascaded into other markets especially NOR and serial NOR, where they became supply constrained and prices rose..."

Toshiba has posted its second straight quarterly profit on rising chip demand, beating analyst estimates for a loss.

Eli Harari, founder, chairman and CEO of SanDisk, will retire from his current positions on December 31, 2010. Sanjay Mehrotra, currently SanDisk's president and COO, will succeed Harari.

Toshiba has started construction of Fab 5 at Yokkaichi Operations, its memory production facility in Mie Prefecture, according to the company. The chip vendor also announced it has signed primary agreements with SanDisk for a new joint venture to operate the new facility.

WebOS tablet is expected to have most of the features and functionality missing from the iPad. A tablet built on a mobile OS, but including USB or SD memory card ports, front and/or rear facing cameras, and compatibility with Adobe Flash content offers business professionals a number of compelling reasons to shun the iPad.

Google's Chrome has now integrated Adobe's Flash directly into the browser.

Adobe on Tuesday will launch the long-awaited Flash Player 10.1 to mobile phone makers and Android's latest operating system will lead the charge.

Intel has announced that Intel-Micron Flash Technologies are in mass production of their 25nm NAND flash memory, and Intel is shipping in volume to customers.

"I think it'll be a story in 2011, and it'll be pretty good penetration in 2012. But, you know, maybe I'm wrong," said Mark Durcan, president and CEO of Micron Technology.