AMD today announced that Charles Matar and Wayne Meretsky have joined the company to assume critical new engineering leadership roles driving hardware and software intellectual property (IP) development for AMD's system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. Matar will draw upon his expertise in SoC and processor design to lead AMD's SoC methodology and client SoC execution. Meretsky will lead the company's software development, ensuring tools will be in place that will enable developers to take advantage of the compute power in AMD's SoC designs.

"Charles and Wayne will serve as key members of our engineering brain trust, bringing with them years of expertise in SoC design and developing 64-bit software ecosystems, respectively," said Mark Papermaster, AMD Chief Technology Officer. "The fact that these computing experts have returned to the company underscores AMD's unique position and opportunity, based on differentiated IP, to take a leadership position in low-power clients and dense cloud servers."

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL), a global leader in integrated silicon solutions, announced that on December 26, 2012, a jury in Pittsburgh delivered a verdict in a lawsuit brought by Carnegie Mellon University ("CMU") against Marvell and Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. ("MSI"), Marvell's U.S. operating subsidiary, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. In the lawsuit, CMU asserted that Marvell infringed two CMU patents claiming a specific technique related to read channel detector technology that is not practiced by any Marvell chips.

Specifically, the patents at issue are U.S. Patent Nos. 6,201,839 and 6,438,180. Marvell and MSI strongly believe the theoretical methods described in these patents cannot practically be built in silicon even using the most advanced techniques available today, let alone with the technology available a decade ago. Rather, Marvell and MSI use their own patented read channel technology developed in house. Nevertheless, the jury disagreed with Marvell and MSI's position and found that the patents were literally and willfully infringed and valid, and awarded damages in the amount of $1.17 billion.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a global leader in digital media, digital convergence technologies and advanced semiconductor solutions, continues to expand its operations in Silicon Valley by investing more resources in its existing R&D centers and establishing new innovation centers.

Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. (SSI) announced plans to build a 1.1 million square foot sales and R&D headquarters on the current site of its semiconductor and display panel businesses, north of downtown San Jose. The building, designed by global architecture firm NBBJ, will be comprised of a 10-story tower, an amenity pavilion and parking garage. The design seeks to encourage interaction among staff, foster connections with the community and provide a space to attract employment in the highly competitive tech market, which is growing at a faster pace than overall employment.

Semiconductor revenues worldwide will see nominal growth this year at less than 1% reaching $304 billion according to the year-end 2012 update of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Semiconductor Applications Forecaster (SAF). The SAF also forecasts that semiconductor revenues will improve by 4.9% to $319 billion in 2013 and log a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1% from 2011-2016, reaching $368 billion in 2016.

Weakness in PC demand, DRAM and overall memory price deterioration, and semiconductor inventory rationalization, coupled with continued global macroeconomic uncertainty from lower global GDP growth, a slowdown in China, the Eurozone debt crisis and recession, Japan's recession, and ongoing fear of fiscal cliff negotiations' impact on IT spending by corporations have all been levers affecting global semiconductor demand this year. Bright spots for the semiconductor market include smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, and automotive electronics, which IDC expects will continue to be key drivers of growth over the coming years.

Samsung Austin Semiconductor LLC today announced that a $4 billion investment at its Austin, Texas, site is on schedule for production of state-of-the-art mobile application processors within the second half of 2013.

The remodeled fabrication line will produce state-of-the-art mobile application processors on 300 mm wafers at the 28 nanometer process node. The new boost in production will occur within the second half of 2013 and is expected to alleviate the rapidly growing demand for application processors for mobile devices.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design, today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $25.22 billion for the month of October 2012, a 1.7 percent increase from the prior month when sales were $24.79 billion. Monthly sales topped $25 billion for the first time in 2012 and remained above the seasonal growth rate in October.

Total year-to-date sales in 2012 were down 3.7 percent compared to the same time last year, but the deficit was smaller than it has been all year. Regionally, sales increased in the Americas by 8.1 percent, marking the region's largest sequential monthly upsurge in the last decade. All monthly sales numbers represent a three-month moving average.

Global Foundries could soon howdy-neighbor TSMC in upstate New York, with the Taiwanese semiconductor giant looking to set up a fab there. According to an X-bit Labs report, TSMC began groundwork on its US venture by consulting with Deloitte, to look for viable sites in Rensselaer, Saratoga and Oneida counties, that have abundant water, power, and gas to operate 3.2 million square feet buildings with 1,000 employees, 40 percent of which are college-graduated engineers.

Deloitte also took a look around Luther Forest Technology Campus, where Global Foundries' Fab 8 is located. A little earlier this week, Bill Owens, a Congressman from upstate New York flew to Taiwan, to meet with TSMC CFO Lora Ho to pitch upstate a little more. TSMC is a principal foundry partner of companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and AMD.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has resumed manufacturing at the Toshiba Semiconductor Thailand Co., Ltd. (TST) facility in Pathumthani, Thailand, in order to meet healthy demand for discrete products for smart phones and tablet PCs. Production resumed earlier this month and shipments will start today. Production will continue until TST opens its new facility in Purachinburi.

TST's facility in the Bangkadi Industrial Park, Pathunthani, was completely inundated in last year's floods, forcing suspension of operations. Assembly and packaging of the small signal devices and photocouplers the facility handled was transferred to other Toshiba facilities in Japan and Malaysia, and also outsourced as a means to respond to changes in demand. In April this year, TST decided to relocate its operations to the 304 Industrial Park in Purachinburi, which is outside of Thailand's major flood plain, leaving the now cleaned up Bangkadi facility vacant and available.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design, today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $24.79 billion for the month of September 2012, a 2 percent increase from the prior month when sales were $24.30 billion. Sales from the third quarter of 2012 totaled $74.4 billion - a 1.8 percent jump compared to the previous quarter - but total 2012 sales were down 4.7 percent compared to the same time last year. All monthly sales numbers represent a three-month moving average.

Intel Capital portfolio company Crossing Automation announced today that it is being acquired by Brooks Automation (NASDAQ: BRKS) for $63 million. Intel Capital invested in Crossing in 2005 and provided financial support and strategic and operational planning guidance to the company, which manufactures fab and tool automation equipment for the semiconductor market, enabling Crossing to achieve significant revenue and operating income growth.

The deal follows on the heels of FormFactor's (NASDAQ: FORM) $117 million acquisition of Intel Capital portfolio company MicroProbe, which provides advanced wafer test solutions to global semiconductor manufacturers. These successful exits signal a revival of opportunities in the semiconductor investment sector where Intel Capital is well positioned to add value to these companies.

Intermolecular, Inc. today announced that GLOBALFOUNDRIES and IBM will leverage Intermolecular's High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) technology, as the companies work to speed development of manufacturing technologies down to the 10 nm node.

Intermolecular's combinatorial technology allows many more tests to be done using a single wafer. This enables experimental data to be generated and analyzed with significantly greater speed and efficiency than a traditional development line, accelerating innovation in materials, processes, and device architectures.

Rambus Inc., one of the world's premier technology licensing companies, announced today it has signed a patent license agreement with Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited. This six-year agreement covers the use of Rambus patented innovations implemented in a broad range of integrated circuit (IC) products offered by Fujitsu Semiconductor. Financial terms of the agreement are confidential.

"As a global leader in the semiconductor market, Fujitsu Semiconductor is an important customer and this agreement validates the continued strength of our portfolio," said Dr. Ronald Black, chief executive officer of Rambus. "We look forward to the opportunity to expand our customer relationships beyond patent license agreements to showcase our technical contributions and system know-how with our customers."

AMD announced today that Jack Harding has been appointed to the company's board of directors. Harding currently serves as president and chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors of eSilicon Corporation, a privately-held semiconductor design and manufacturing services provider he co-founded. eSilicon designs and manufactures complex, custom chips for a broad and growing portfolio of large and small firms. Harding brings more than 25 years of management experience in the semiconductor industry to the board, especially in the area of ASIC and system on a chip (SoC) design, productization and manufacturing.

"Jack's wealth of industry experience and familiarity with evolving industry trends make him a perfect choice to join the AMD board," said Bruce Claflin, chairman, AMD Board of Directors. "As AMD establishes itself as a more nimble, flexible semiconductor design innovator, Jack's operational experience, strategic expertise and business acumen for bringing SoC and custom integrated circuit solutions to market should add tremendous value for AMD's future business."

PLX Technology, Inc., a leading global supplier of high-speed connectivity solutions enabling emerging data center architectures, today announced a new trio of ultra-high lane count PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 switches developed for cutting-edge markets like storage systems, high-end graphics, and communications platforms. The high-performance ExpressLane PCIe Gen3 switches include the PEX8796 (96 lanes, 24 ports), PEX8780 (80 lanes, 20 ports) and PEX8764 (64 lanes, 16 ports), which expand the PLX portfolio to 14 PCIe Gen3 devices. Designers choosing the PEX8796 switch -- touting bandwidth of 8 Gigatransfers per second, per lane, in full duplex mode -- are rewarded with amazing throughput of 1,536 gigabits per second (192 gigabytes/s), delivering performance that challenges all other interconnect technologies.

Mentor Graphics Corp. today announced that GLOBALFOUNDRIES is helping its customers improve reliability checking by adding Calibre PERC to select 28nm bulk CMOS design enablement flows. Calibre PERC will give designers access to the new reliability verification rules developed by the IBM Semiconductor Development Alliance (ISDA), augmented with GLOBALFOUNDRIES specific checks to help prevent external latch-up. Using Calibre PERC's unique architecture, complex reliability rules that require the integration of logical (net list) and layout (GDS) information can be fully automated, eliminating manual spreadsheet-based efforts and reducing the chances of design errors.

"In the past, verification of latch-up immunity depended on manual layout checks and rough approximations of device and interconnect resistance using traditional mechanisms," said Bill Liu, vice president of design enablement at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. "Now our customers can perform accurate measurements and analysis automatically using Calibre PERC's data integration capability. For example, some of our customers are currently using PERC to accurately determine the resistance of the paths in complex output driver arrays as a function of device spacing. This allows them to easily and accurately detect points in the circuit where latch-up could be an issue and to make appropriate improvements."

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has appointed Kensuke Oka and Masahiro Yamamura to its board of directors, effective May 17, 2012. Mr. Oka is president and CEO of Hitachi America, Ltd., and Mr. Yamamura is corporate officer, general manager of the Semiconductor Business Division of Hitachi, Ltd.

"The additions of Mr. Oka and Mr. Yamamura offer our leadership team vital insight as we operate WD and HGST as independent subsidiaries in the competitive hard drive industry," said Thomas Pardun, WD chairman of the board. "Both have deep executive management experience leading operations in the electronics and industrial systems industries, primarily for Hitachi, providing new perspectives to WD as we continue our focus on sustained profitable growth."

Worldwide semiconductor revenues increased more than 3.7% year over year to $301 billion in 2011, according to the latest version of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiconductor Applications Forecaster (SAF). The industry weathered the macroeconomic uncertainties in the U.S and Europe, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, China's slow down in the second half of the year, and floods in Thailand. Meanwhile, device applications, such as smartphones, media tablets and e-readers, automotive infotainment, notebook PCs, datacenter servers, and wireless and wired communication infrastructure drove robust consumption of semiconductors.

IDC's SAF tracks more than 100 semiconductor companies. Over 40 of these companies experienced year-over-year revenue growth greater than 5%, while about the same number of companies saw their revenue decline by more than 5%.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it will rebuild its semiconductor manufacturing operations in Thailand by relocating Toshiba Semiconductor Thailand Co., Ltd. (TST) to a new manufacturing facility. The move will position the company to meet future growth in demand and replace the factory inundated by the 2011 floods.

Established in 1990, TST carries out back-end processes-assembly and packaging-for small signal devices and photocouplers. Small signal devices control current and voltage in digital consumer products, a product segment that is expected to grow in coming years, with a primary focus on smart phones and tablets PCs. Photocouplers are used widely in industrial products, such as inverters, and are also expected to see strong demand growth.

UBM TechInsights, the leader in technology and IP consulting, is pleased to recognize Intel - Micron for their collaboration on the Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) 20 nm MLC NAND Flash and award them with the Insight Award for the 2011 Semiconductor of the Year.

UBM TechInsights' circuit analysis verified that Intel - Micron's latest Flash component was the first to be manufactured at the 20 nm process node. By using high-k dielectric to replace the silicon dioxide, that is traditionally used, Intel-Micron managed to reduce leakage while keeping power consumption low - a must for today's light weight portable electronics.

The Advanced Technology Investment Company and the state of Saxony, Germany, today announced the establishment of two research labs working in tandem on areas of interest to the semiconductor industry. The 'Twin Labs' project will be backed by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) and Saxony, which have each pledged US$2.4 million towards the plan over two years. Masdar Institute of Science and Technology will host the Abu Dhabi research center, while Technische Universität Dresden will oversee development of the Saxony lab.

Both sites will be of similar size, initially staffed with 10-12 graduate/Ph.D. students. Additional faculty members will be engaged at a later stage after the centers have established initial successes. Research will focus primarily on three-dimensional chip stacking, a potentially faster and more energy efficient semiconductor technology that follows ATIC's broader emphasis on minimum electronic energy systems, or MEES.

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., an industry leading Storage HBA and RAID solutions manufacturer, will unveil a new series of Thunderbolt based Storage Controller Boards at the NAB 2012 tradeshow. This ground-breaking new product series aggregates Intel's revolutionary I/O technology, with HighPoint's extensive SAS, SATA and USB 3.0 design and manufacturing expertise, delivering innovative, highly versatile development platforms for storage solution providers.

Thunderbolt's revolutionary connectivity technology, presents great opportunities for HighPoint and solution providers the world over. For 2012, we are expanding our comprehensive product portfolio to include a new series of Thunderbolt based Storage expansion and controller boards.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in standards development for the microelectronics industry, today announced that its JC-64 Committee for Embedded Memory Storage and Removable Memory Cards has formed a Subcommittee focused on the standardization of non-volatile wireless memory. To be chaired by Nokia and vice-chaired by Micron Technology and Samsung Semiconductor, the JC-64.9 Subcommittee for Wireless Memory welcomes interested companies worldwide to participate by joining JEDEC or calling 703-907-7560 for more information.

Wireless memory is rapidly emerging as the next generation in data transfer technology, and is intended to enable fast, wireless connectivity with read/write capability between mobile devices (Wireless Memory Hosts) and battery-free memory tags (Wireless Memory Tags).

Fueled by strong sales growth in its core chip businesses-and boosted by a major acquisition-leading semiconductor supplier Intel Corp. in 2011 attained its highest annual market share in more than 10 years, according to the IHS iSuppli Competitive Landscape Tool from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). Intel in 2011 increased its overall semiconductor market share to 15.6 percent, up 2.5 percentage points from 13.1 percent in 2010, according to the final IHS semiconductor estimate for the year. This represents the highest market share for Intel going back to at least 2001, when it reached 14.9 percent. Over the last five years, Intel's share of the market ranged from 11.9 percent to 13.9 percent.

"Intel in 2011 captured the headlines with its major surge in growth," said Dale Ford, head of electronics and semiconductor research for IHS. "The company's rise was spurred by soaring demand for its PC-oriented microprocessors, and for its NAND flash memory used in consumer and wireless products. Intel's revenue also was boosted by its acquisition of Infineon's wireless business unit. The company's strong rise helped it to stave off the rising challenge mounted by No. 2 semiconductor supplier Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which had been whittling away at Intel's lead in recent years." The table below presents the final 2011 semiconductor market share ranking from the IHS.

Marvell today announced mass deployment of the Marvell 88SS9187 SATA controller fueled by high performance embedded processor technology. The 88SS9187 features a 6 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) SATA Revision 3.1 compliant host interface optimized for the fast-growing solid state drive (SSD) sector, offering many game changing benefits to the consumer, mobile and enterprise markets. A significant number of high-profile SSD manufacturers are set to deploy Marvell's newest solution immediately, with additional partners expected to integrate 88SS9187 implementations later this year.

Marvell's newest SSD controller boasts an open, world-class architecture that supports industry-standard, high-speed NAND Flash interface up to 200 MB/s per channel. The 88SS9187 also offers a groundbreaking correction capability thanks to its high performance ECC engine with Adaptive Read and Write Scheme and on-chip RAID functionality to allow use of the latest generation of NAND Flash devices in the fast-growing SSD markets.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design, today announced that worldwide semiconductor sales were $23.1 billion in January 2012, a 2.7 percent decrease from the month prior when sales were $23.8 billion. All monthly sales numbers represent a 3-month moving average.

"The month over month revenue decline for January is in line with seasonal patterns," said Brian Toohey, president, Semiconductor Industry Association. "A weakened global economy amidst inflation concerns and the European debt crisis continued to affect sales at the start of the year, but there are strong signs pointing to recovery and growth as 2012 progresses."

Semiconductor sales are expected to improve due to positive demand drivers, an improved U.S. economic outlook and the resolution to the floods in Thailand.