Marvell is currently porting high-volume products over to TSMC first with many of these currently being qualified with end-users. However, Marvell acknowledged that even some new designs would have to be fabricated by Intel for the foreseeable future. The full porting operation to TSMC is not expected to be completed until the end of 2008.

With much fanfare, the HD DVD Promotional Group announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that Chinese manufacturers would begin selling low-price HD DVD players in the US this year. But as of mid-August, no manufacturer or retailer has announced a firm date for the players, although HD DVD backers say they still believe players will arrive this year.

...(the) device will boast a 2.2-inch 320×240 resolution display, USB 2.0 connectivity, 512MB of internal storage, a microSD expansion slot, built-in FM tuner, voice recorder, and somewhere close to 20-hours of battery life.

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, announced it has closed a US$218.5 million investment in VMware.

"...Samsung will cut more than 100 jobs at its semiconductor division, Maeil Business Newspaper reported. The company last month reported its smallest quarterly profit in four years after a glut drove down prices of memory chips..."

Sony announced that it had developed a battery strong enough to power electronics solely through the chemical reactions of sugar, raising the possibility of truly ecologically friendly power sources.

Industry sources said TSMC is in intensive talks with Hynix over the purchase of the equipment for around US$500-550 million. The monthly production of the M8 and M9 lines is 300,000 in wafer injection standards and the facilities are estimated to be worth 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion Korean won. Industry sources said a partial sale of the lines is more probable because of the cost burden.

Photonic technology, which uses light to transmit data, is the key to networks with terabit-per-second speeds. But silicon, a mainstay of the electronics industry, has been largely useless for photonics because of its poor optical properties. Photonics researchers have had to rely on exotic semiconductors such as indium phosphide, which emit light easily but are expensive and hard to work with. But in 2004, Paniccia's group showed that silicon could be used to make a modulator that encodes data onto a light beam at one gigabit per second.

...Rambus engaged in "intentional deceptive conduct" in the context of the standard-setting process by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard, or engaging in a patent ambush. The EC said its preliminary view is that without its patent ambush, Rambus would not have been able to charge the royalty rates it currently does...

The owners of the DivX video codec have produced a prototype media streamer, one which appears to challenge the likes of the AppleTV.

The Trojan responsible for stealing more than 1.6 million personal records from Monster.com uses that information to build targeted spam that offers recipients money laundering jobs, said Symantec.

Following an preliminary announcement earlier this year, Sony has officially unveiled PlayTV, a new service that transforms the PS3 into a digital video recorder.

"...Can we, with our customers, drive down the cost per watt of photovoltaics? Splinter asks. We've got to...Currently photovoltaics cost $2 to $3 per watt to build, down from $22 in 1980. Splinter thinks he can help drive the cost of solar to under $1 a watt..."

"...some outsiders suspect Samsung failed to identify the cause of the problem despite the passage of three weeks...a Hynix staffer said the company's own simulation of a similar case proved that this kind of power cut was very unusual..."

...in Marlboro, Mass, we have a 15MW Evergreen-only factory producing wafers, cells, and panels. At this factory, we also perform a substantial amount of R&D development. The EverQ JV in Thalheim will have about 100MW of production capacity by the end of 2007. Evergreen will own one-third. We recently announced the start of our second Evergreen-only factory, a 75MW facility located in Devens, Mass. We plan to grow Evergreen-only production to 500MW by 2012 and work with our partners to expand the EverQ JV to its planned 300MW capacity.

We look at UBiQUiO's 503G smart phone which packs plenty of features including 96MB RAM, WM6, HSDPA 3.5G and more!

...With both 200mm and 300mm capability, we represent a US based source for large IC companies developing wafer level interconnect," said Steve Anderson, Surfect's chief executive officer. "I am pleased to note that we have already received service orders from several IC suppliers..."

...Wireless connections between PCs and peripherals and the Web will become more important in the market than wired connectivity options because of the rapid growth of PC and other mobile consumer electronics devices...

Seagate, currently the worlds largest manufacturer of traditional hard drives, has decided to enter the solid-state disk market. It is aiming at the enterprise first....and the CEO of Seagate had some rather harsh words to say about existing SDD manufacturers, claiming their supporting technology is outdated..

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...the Japanese industrial giant could be on the hook for up to 138 billion yen (US$1.2 billion), according to calculations by Nikko Citigroup analyst Kota Ezawa. That is equivalent to 28% of Matsushita's 2008 operating profit forecast and nearly five times the yearly revenues of its entire battery business for the fiscal year that ended in March, Nikko Citigroup estimated.