10/09/2007  October 9, 2007 - While much of the industry chews over downgraded equipment sales and capex outlooks and anxiously waits the 4Q selling season, now's the time to start locking in profits on some big-name equipment supplier stocks, according to a financial analyst.

10/08/2007  October 8, 2007 - Toshiba Corp. is planning a production ramp of 30nm flash memory chips by the middle of its fiscal year 2009 (mid- to late CY09) in a bid to pull ahead of South Korean rival Samsung Electronics Co., according to the Nikkei daily.

10/08/2007  October 8, 2007 - Spansion Inc. says it is acquiring longtime flash memory partner Saifun Semiconductors Ltd. in a deal valued at roughly $368 million in stock (about $135M will be netted to Saifun shareholders, who will ultimately hold ~15% of Spansion).

10/04/2007  October 4, 2007 - Winbond Electronics Corp. says it has formed a task force to evaluate formation of a new subsidiary to take over the company's logic IC business next year, a move that would vault the company into the dedicated memory chipmaking ranks of Taiwan's PowerChip, Nanya, ProMos, and Inotera, and mark the end of the island's last IDM to do both memory and logic work.

10/03/2007  October 3, 2007 - Capital spending should rise about 5% next year, an "optimistic" projection driven heavily by a surge from flash manufacturers, who will surpass their DRAM counterparts in terms of capacity, according to data from Strategic Marketing Associates.

10/03/2007  October 3, 2007 - Memory firms' investments have continued longer than expected, but the ride's about to get bumpy, with tool sales grinding to flat growth and capex backing into negative territory over the next year, according to new forecasts by Gartner Inc.

10/02/2007  October 2, 2007 - Slumping ASPs caused by overcapacity, and a migration to higher densities, will cause a 1% dip in the flash memory market this year. But forecasted demand across several applications -- notably the computing sector -- will drive significant growth for NAND for the next several years, according to IC Insights Inc.

10/02/2007  October 2, 2007 - Sony Corp. and Qimonda AG say they have agreed to create a 50/50 joint venture to design high-performance, low power, embedded and customer specific DRAMs for consumer and graphic applications.

10/02/2007  October 1, 2007 - Taiwan's Mosel Vitelic Inc. has signed a five-year, $190 million deal to receive multicrystalline solar wafers from Chinese firm LDK Solar, in the Taiwan firm's first big (and public) solar-cell materials procurement deal. Deliveries are slated to start next year.

10/01/2007  Deep etching equipment is about to make a big jump in throughput. Franz Laermer of Robert Bosch GmbH, inventor of the widely used Bosch process for deep reactive ion etching, told SST partner Nikkei Microdevices how faster volume production speeds will not only bring down the costs of MEMS devices to expand their use in consumer applications and wafer-level packaging, but will also make production of 3D interconnect with through-silicon vias practical.

10/01/2007  October 1, 2007 - Korean memory chipmaker Hynix Semiconductor Inc. has licensed phase-change memory technology from Ovonyx Inc., and the firm will actively support Hynix's own internal development of PCM products, the companies announced.

10/01/2007  Tightening supplies and better pricing in NAND flash memory drove a nice spike in overall chip sales in August, according to data from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), which showed Asia ramping up again, but the US still behind the curve.

09/28/2007  September 28, 2007 - Hynix plans to hike output of >1Gb DRAM to 60% of its total DRAMs by year's end, after ceasing DRAM chip sales in spot markets in an effort to step still-falling prices.

09/28/2007  September 28, 2007 - Oki Electric Industry Ltd. has agreed to sell its wireless design center to India's Wipro Technologies in an undisclosed all-cash deal, in order to focus on its core design capabilities. Wipro also will set up a dedicated development center for Oki.

09/27/2007  September 27, 2007 - SanDisk Corp. has opened its flash memory assembly/test plant in Shanghai's Zizhu Science Park, its first production facility in China, which will focus on system-in-package chips, and is expected to meet approximately 30% of projected global demand for SanDisk's SiP products, the company said in a statement.

09/27/2007  At a one-day technical symposium on Sept. 20 sponsored by the IEEE and Applied Materials, a standing-room-only crowd of technologists learned about the leading-edge of manufacturing the densest, fastest, cheapest IC memories. The take-away theme: the two trains of DRAM and flash memory technologies have long "left the station" and unless and until they stop, other promising technologies such as phase-change (PRAM) and magneto-resistance (MRAM) will be relegated to niche applications.

09/26/2007  September 26, 2007 - A US District Court in Northern California has ruled that TSMC did in fact misuse trade secrets concerning embedded DRAM allegedly shared with it by UniRAM Technology, and ordered the Taiwan foundry giant to pay $30.5 million.

09/26/2007  September 26, 2007 - A current upswing in memory and electronic equipment can't offset what was a horrid performance in the first six months of the year, according to iSuppli Corp., which has again shaved its outlook for 2007 chip sales to just 3.5% growth, from expectations of 6% growth back in June. But the firm emphasizes that the worst is well behind the industry, and growth in 2008 should be a little better than anticipated.

09/25/2007  September 25, 2007 - NOR flash memory firm Spansion Inc. has named Donald Lucas as its chairman, a role vacated by AMD top exec Hector Ruiz, and added Gilled Delfassy to its board of directors.

09/25/2007  The growing role that solid-state drives, which use NAND flash memory to store digital data, are playing in the storage market, was the subject of much discussion at the IDEMA DISKCON 2007 conference (9/19-20). Samsung, for one, is upbeat for new applications as costs decline and densities soar, and has big plans to cut costs further. However, the fact is that disk drives are still the storage technology of choice -- and the rise of consumer demand is actually helping HDDs as much as flash.