Broadcom claims Qualcomm has double-dipped on its patents by charging a fee for the use of its technology and another fee for its use in combination with another product. It's a practice that is referred to as patent exhaustion. The lawsuit "further asserts that these practices constitute patent misuse that has brought Qualcomm a financial windfall and brought harm to the industry and consumers," Broadcom said in a statement. In addition to licensing its technology, Qualcomm also makes chips for phones using the same IP.

But a more immediate pinch could be felt across the industry as a result of the tightening credit, says Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at MIT's Sloan School of Business. The difficulty of obtaining credit will "affect innovation," Lo predicts. "The capital is not there, and all investors will have a harder time raising funds." The credit squeeze could prompt large technology firms that need plenty of capital to start looking elsewhere for extra investment, perhaps to countries with substantial foreign-currency reserves.

The Supreme Court has refused to consider appeals from Samsung Electronics in a case against Rambus, a memory design and patent licensing company, closing a saga that began in 2005 over alleged patent infringement.

confidence, and cloudy visibility in the second half of the year have forced Gartner to lower its forecast for 2008 revenue growth in Asia/Pacific's semiconductor market. The research company in its Semiconductor DQ Monday Report yesterday decreased its estimate for the region from 6.4% to 5.2% growth on an annual basis.

Japan's Toshiba is in talks to buy US chip maker Spansion, two industry sources said, in the latest sign of pressure for consolidation in the struggling memory sector. However, Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said his company was not in talks to buy Spansion, and was also not considering such a move.

AMD plans to announce Tuesday that it will split into two companies - one focused on designing microprocessors and the other on manufacturing them. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms will inject at least US$6 billion into the two firms, mostly to finance a new chip factory that AMD planned to build near Albany, NY, and to upgrade one of the company's existing plants in Dresden, Germany.

The operator didn't disclose how many devices it has sold, so it's not clear that this is evidence of overwhelming demand for the G1, the first phone to run Google's Android software. The news follows reports last week that some customers trying to preorder a G1 were told there were none left. At the time, T-Mobile said there were still a limited number available.

...PV support is shaky in the European Union. In Spain, a new cap on solar electric installations of 300 MWp in 2009 could maroon more than a gigawatt worth of product. Other than Germany, which has implemented market controls, there's nowhere else for these stranded megawatts to go. In the United States, incentives remain weak in what is essentially a one-state market: California. However, even there, government incentives are necessary to fuel the willingness to deploy what remains a costly technology.

Our plan is to directly take legal action against the Japanese government, said Park Hyun, a Hynix spokesman. Park, however, didn't give the exact timing of the action but added that it wouldn't be this month. Hynix's challenge against Tokyo came following the US' decision not to renew punitive tariffs on its semiconductors. The European Union dropped tariffs on Hynix in April this year.

Sumita Optical Glass and Toyoda Gosei developed a glass-packaged white LED and showcased it at CEATEC JAPAN 2008.