The Japanese LED maker has developed high-performance 660 nm chips that accelerate plant photosynthesis.

Japanese electronics maker Hitachi will close a Czech plasma television manufacturing plant due to falling prices and demand in the economic slowdown, the local unit said on Friday.

Wacker Chemie AG, a German chemical company, announced Thursday that it will build a $1 billion plant with 500 jobs in southeastern Tennessee to produce hyperpure polycrystalline silicon, a product used to make solar panels and semiconductors.

Matsushita Electric Industrial has informally decided to build a lithium-ion battery plant in Suminoe Ward, Osaka, that will be the largest such plant in the world, it has been learned. The plant will be built at a cost of more than 100 billion yen on a site near Osaka Bay that was formerly occupied by a thermal power station of the Kansai Electric Power. Matsushita Battery Industrial, a Matsushita Electric subsidiary, will commence production at the plant in fiscal 2010 at the earliest, according to sources.

The money will be split between three projects related to chip nanotechnologies, IBM said. They are updating its manufacturing plant in East Fishkill, New York; expanding its operations at the University of Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, a creating a new center for research into chip packaging at a location to be determined in Upstate New York. IBM didn't say how much money was going to each.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics is to invest one billion dollars in a "state-of-the-art" microchip manufacturing facility in the Philippines. The Manila Bulletin newspaper said the facility will be built on a 30-hectare (74-acre) site in the Clark Special Economic Zone near the former US airforce base north of Manila. Quoting unnamed sources, the paper said "it will be a state-of-the-art" facility with construction starting "within the year."