Michael Singer

If the rest of the year looks like January, 2003 should be a banner year for semiconductors, according to one industry trade group. New numbers issued Monday by Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), global semiconductor sales totaled $12.2 billion in January 2003. That number represents a 2.4 percent decrease from the $12.5 billion in revenue reported […]

Four companies in the Silicon Valley-based joined forces Thursday to form a Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) for tunable lasers. The coalition of iolon Inc., Intel , Bookham Technology and Santur Corp. says its goal is standardizing functionality, size and performance for optical internetworking based on the Optical Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) tunable laser implementation agreement (IA) published […]

The U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky Thursday issued a preliminary injunction against a company accused of selling chips that bypass the printer technology of Lexmark . The court ordered Static Control Components of Sanford, N.C. to “cease making, selling or otherwise trafficking” in the Smartek microchip. The processor is used in […]

Palm Friday confirmed it has cut a total of 19 percent of its employees and contractors in the last three months as it prepares for the end of its fiscal third quarter. The company said about 250 people in both its Palm Solutions hardware division and its PalmSource software subsidiary are getting pink slips with […]

With less than a week before a jury will hear their patent infringement claims, lawyers for Microtune Thursday filed even more paperwork; this time accusing semiconductor maker Broadcom of antitrust violations. Plano, Texas-based Microtune is alleging Irvine, Calif.-based Broadcom engaged in various illegal anti-competitive activities including bundling its tuner together with its demodulator chips in […]

KDDI Corporation Thursday said it is looking to Silicon Valley for help with its next-generation mobile services, @Mail. The second largest telecommunications company in Japan said it has tapped Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP and Campbell, Calif.-based Opsol to support high-speed, high-volume data distribution to KDDI’s 17 million subscribers. Financial terms of the deal were not […]

QUALCOMM Thursday shifted its strategy towards some of its encryption software and began giving it away for free. The San Diego-based wireless giant announced it would allow free use of its SOBER and Turing encryption algorithms for any purpose. In the past, QUALCOMM provided the encryption software only to its licensed manufacturers or for non-commercial […]

Three of the largest semiconductor manufacturers Thursday officially opened a new US$ 1.4 billion research and development center in Crolles near Grenoble, France. STMicroelectronics , Royal Philips Electronics , and Motorola are behind the facility dubbed the “Crolles2 Alliance.” The goal is to pioneer CMOS technology from 90 nanometer processes to 32nm over the next […]

Radio frequency (RF) subsystems provider Endwave Corp. Wednesday said it has acquired certain broadband assets of Arcom Wireless. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. The deal between Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Endwave and the Dover Corp. subsidiary includes a transceiver design, equipment and intellectual property licenses. Endwave says it will take the technology to make […]

Sun Microsystems Wednesday detailed more of its new “software-train”, which it says will beat Microsoft at its own game. Dubbed “Project Orion,” the Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm said it will base all of its software on its Solaris, Solaris for x86 and Linux platforms and offer a single distribution venue with three licensing models. The […]

Looking to expand the functions of its Zaurus product line, Sharp Electronics Wednesday said it has hooked up with Socket Communications . The partnership guarantees that Newark, Calif.-based Socket’s CompactFlash plug-in accessories are compatible with Sharp’s Linux-based family of PDAs. Included in the deal are Socket’s Bluetooth Connection Kit, WLAN Card, Low Power Ethernet Card, […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems Tuesday said its five-year strategy for its SPARC and UltraSPARC processors will improve its servers by leaps and bounds. As part of its “Throughput Computing” strategy, the improvements to the 64-bit processors are based technology Sun acquired from Afara Websystems last year. Within two years, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun said […]