Foreign investment has been one of the factors helping drive the rapid growth of China's economy. The investment increased in August, after 10 consecutive months of declines.

Google chief economist Hal Varian is pretty confident the US economy is recovering, and he's not just basing that on government data.

TSMC and SMIC reached a US$175 million deal in 2005 to settle a claim by TSMC. But the Taiwan-based company now alleges SMIC reneged on the deal, and oral arguments began yesterday in Oakland.

National Semiconductor's fiscal first-quarter profits dropped 63% as revenues fell by a third, but the analog chip maker indicated demand was rebounding.

Taiwan plans to sign an agreement with China in October that will allow some of the mainland's huge pool of liquidity to start flowing into the island's stockmarket, according to local media.

Pliant Technology has released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second as the top competitive drives.

The South Korean won against the dollar strengthened to a one-month high of 1220.50 in early Asian deals on September 11. On the upside, 1218.3 is seen as the next target level for the Korean currency.

Recent signs that recession has ended in some major economies, including China's major trading partner Japan, suggest that exports may pick up again.

"Despite positive earnings pre-announcements, the overall tone from companies remains relatively muted and cautious," said Doug Freedman, an analyst for Broadpoint AmTech.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to continue his government's aggressive stimulus efforts, saying the world's third-largest economy faces persistent problems and uncertainties from the global recession despite an upturn in growth.

Taiwan's former President Chen Shui-bian has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of corruption by a court in Taipei.

Last October, Doug Grose was given a daunting task–turning the semiconductor manufacturing operations of AMD into a service that would also serve other chip designers. Now it looks like his job may effectively double.

Premier Liu Chao-shiuan and his Cabinet (the Executive Yuan) resigned en masse Thursday (Sep 10) morning to assume political responsibility for the government's handling of the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot.

A slow and still-fragile recovery is taking hold across the US.