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.

Ericsson, the world's largest maker of telecom network equipment, said Friday that an industry-wide shortage of key components had contributed to an 8 percent decline in sales in the second quarter, echoing concerns raised earlier this week by Nokia.

Nokia's smartphones outsold the iPhone by 8.4 times. The Finnish company sold 14.5 million smartphones that quarter. And remember, that was only a fraction of their total mobile phone sales...

A record 3.2 million iPhone activations helped boost AT&T's second-quarter earnings 26% yoy.

Chip designer Rambus has reported bigger-than-expected losses for the second quarter of 2010, although revenues rose with the help of agreements signed earlier this year with Samsung Electronics.

Half a billion people around the world are now using Facebook on a monthly basis. That means Facebook has a slightly smaller population than the continent of North America. The social network also has enough users to put 75 people on every one of the over 6.6 million square miles of Russia, the largest country in the world by landmass.

Xilinx has announced first quarter fiscal 2011 sales of US$594.7 million, up 12% sequentially and 58% on year. Net profits for the quarter reached US$158.6 million, compared to profits of US$148.5 million in the prior quarter and US$38 million a year ago.

"Because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes..."

Qualcomm, the largest wireless chipmaker, has said the mobile phone industry had reached a "transformative stage" as it reported third-quarter sales and profits ahead of expectations.

The talk of a Samsung-Infineon deal surfaced in German publication Manager Magazine but neither firm would comment. Two years ago, Samsung greatly extended its purchasing of cellphone chips from Infineon, largely at the expense of Qualcomm.

Applied Materials has announced it will stop new sales of its "turnkey" SunFab thin-film solar manufacturing line and concentrate on silicon solar and LED lighting. The restructuring of its Energy and Environmental Solutions business will lead to the elimination of 400-500 positions and a third-quarter charge between US$375-425 million.

Samsung has begun mass producing what it claims is the industry's first 2Gb DDR3 memory using 30nm-class process technology. The chip was introduced on February 1.

China mapped out investment of 5 trillion yuan ($738 billion) into alternative energy over the next decade, an official with the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Tuesday.

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

South Korea's LG Display said on Thursday it would invest 618 billion won (US$513.5 million) in an LCD plant to boost capacity for small-sized flat screens.

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.