Programmable logic vendor Altera set a new all-time high in quarterly sales in the second quarter of 2010. It also beat consensus analyst expectations for sales and net income during the quarter.

"We'll seek opportunities including acquisitions and partnerships," executive officer Takehiro Fukuda, who oversees finance and accounting at Elpida, said in a recent interview. "We need to further expand the range of our business in areas such as mobile phone and television chips, and we plan to cut our debt-to-equity ratio to 1 from 1.3 by year-end and eventually to 0.3."

Samsung in June announced plans to expand the capacity of its 12-inch chip plant in Austin with a US$3.6 billion investment, and hire 500 more workers there by 2011.

Google Energy has signed a deal to purchase 114 megawatts of energy from a wind farm in Iowa, marking the first deal done by Google's energy subsidiary.

Apple posted a video demonstrating the antenna issues in Nokia's smartphone. The phone drops from seven bars to two when held in a similar manner to the grip that causes problems on the iPhone 4.

If you really want to go undercover in the global economy, and manipulate it to your own ends...

When asked whether Toshiba would release smartphones anytime soon, Toshiba Australia's chief Whittard answered with "probably not."

A video-heavy Web site that Apple set up in the wake of the antenna controversy, showed footage of the extensive internal tests that Apple says have been the fruits of the $100 million it's invested in "advanced antenna design and test labs."

Now, many or all the famous (Nvidia, Qualcomm, Marvel...) TSMC customers already use ARM designs with TSMC, but this deal might make things easier for smaller ones. In short: expect to see ARM continue to proliferate on the mobile computing market.

The numbers paint an interesting picture. Apple now sells 92,000 iPhones a day. For comparison, 160,000 Android devices are being sold each day, 120,000 BlackBerries, 45,000 Windows Mobile devices and 260,000 Symbian handsets. Apple's market share in smartphones could now be down to 14%, from its peak of 17%, where it has been for the previous 3 quarters.

Nokia, which is losing market share in high-end smartphones as it struggles to finish the flagship N8 device, has seen two-thirds of its market value wiped out since Apple's 2007 introduction of the iPhone. The company may name a new CEO to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as early as this month, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Google posted a note on the Nexus One website to explain that it no longer will sell its Nexus One phones online. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead.

Texas Instruments has said weaker-than-expected orders from one mobile phone customer, identified as Nokia by some analysts, caused second-quarter revenues to miss Wall Street forecasts.

Brian Toohey has taken office as president of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), succeeding George Scalise who had led the association since 1997.

But publishers said it is still too early to gauge for the entire industry whether the growth of e-books is cannibalizing sales of paperback books, a huge and crucial market. Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also countered the perception that sales of the company's Kindle e-reading device had suffered due to competition from other devices, such as Apple's iPad.

China has passed the U.S. to become the world's biggest energy consumer, according to new data from the International Energy Agency, a milestone that reflects both China's decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding clout as an industrial giant.

The Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), South Korea's most powerful business lobby, has asked Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee to head the group. Lee was once convicted of tax evasion.

Applied Materials "has not made a dent in the mask shop," said Brian Trafas, chief marketing officer at KLA-Tencor. "They have a few systems in the fab, but it's a small share."