"We continue to make progress in every aspect of the SunFab lines and are well on our way to delivering 10% efficient SunFab panels and US$1 per watt production costs in 2010," said company CTO Mark Pinto. He also laid out plans for SunFab panels with 12% conversion efficiency and module costs below US$0.70/watt by 2012.

Canon is reportedly telling customers it will no longer develop future, leading-edge lithography tools, namely 193nm dry and immersion scanners, according to industry sources.

Backend tool giant Kulicke & Soffa Industries has raised its revenue outlook for its fiscal fourth quarter ending October 3.

South Korean exports in September 2009 will probably post their best performance in almost a year and confidence among its exporters has surged to the strongest in almost six years.

DRAM sales will probably climb 21% to US$22.4 billion in 2010, the first gain in four years, a Seoul-based analyst at Morgan Stanley wrote in a report.

In addition to a DRAM recovery, the NOR and NAND flash memory market has been extremely active. The volume of requests for Spansion and Numonyx flash memory has tripled over the last two months.

The SSD market has been one of several factors that have boosted demand for NAND flash memory and, as a result, boosted NAND flash prices, too. While this trend will likely continue to benefit Micron and SanDisk, it is equally likely to work against STEC in the longer term.

The IBM eDRAM in 32nm SOI technology is the fastest embedded memory announced to date, achieving latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds.

Singapore and Thailand have reported steady improvement in August export figures as signs of a gradual global recovery began to emerge.

The serial-ATA (SATA) SSDs, from Samsung Electronics, are aimed at supporting virtualized environments and I/O intensive applications.

Rambus and Kingston Technology have jointly announced a collaborative development of a threaded module prototype using DDR3 DRAM technology.

"The worst is behind us. The upward trend has stabilized, so we now anticipate second-half sales growth of about 40% compared to the first half of 2009," said the analog/mixed-signal foundry.