Spansion Inc. and SK Hynix today announced an alliance to deliver Spansion SLC NAND products at the 4x, 3x, and 2x nodes to the embedded market. The first Spansion SLC NAND products resulting from this alliance will be available beginning in the second quarter of 2012. As part of the relationship, the companies will enter into a patent cross-licensing agreement.

Spansion's NAND products complement its NOR offering and complete its product line, which is targeted at embedded applications such as automotive, industrial and telecommunications. Spansion's high performance and high reliability SLC NAND product portfolio will come with Spansion's recognized customer support and commitment for longevity of supply, which is highly valued in the embedded market, where Spansion has established relationships. Spansion will apply its stringent process for qualification, testing, extended temperature support and packaging to its NAND products. The company plans to introduce a family of NAND products over the next few quarters.

This may not be a surprise to the PC enthusiast community but, the PC gaming market has never been healthier, according to a report from the not-for-profit consortium PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA). The report claims that in 2011, the industry reached a global record $18.6 billion, a growth of 15 percent over the prior year. The report cites burgeoning foreign markets and social games as large factors in the findings. The results of the PCGA's third annual "Horizons" research report found that China is growing at almost twice the rate of the global market, bringing in $6 billion for a total growth of 27 percent. The US, UK, Korea, Japan, and Germany saw increased revenue of 11%, by comparison. Asian companies, in general, are noted for spurring on sales in their markets.

The report also cites Zynga and Nexon (of MapleStory fame) as frontrunners in the PC space. Zynga in particular doubled its revenue to roughly $1.1 billion, putting it on-par with Nexon. Zynga and the German company Bigpoint were noted for pushing the free-to-play model, already popular in Asian territories, into North America and Europe. The report also notes the movers and shakers of big-budget PC games from the western market, like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift, along with multiplatform titles like Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Looking forward, the report speculates that the industry will grow to $25.5 billion (37 percent increase) by 2015, thanks to increased broadband penetration and digital delivery. The report is from a PC gaming coalition with a vested interest in trumpeting the industry's health, but even so, the rumors of PC's death have greatly exaggerated.

In many markets, people and businesses with WiFi hotspots have began monetizing their idle internet bandwidth by sharing it with others via middleman service providers such as FON. While the business model itself is a solid one where everyone wins, it is faced with technical hurdles. Unlike cellular ISPs that use 3G HSDPA technologies, where the size of a "cell" is much larger than the coverage area of a WiFi hotspot, and where moving between cells is seamless, with close to no drops in connectivity (providing there are no dead-zones between the cells), WiFi hotspots have the issue of logging out of one hotspot before logging into another.

This issue makes moving between multiple FON hotspots result in temporary connectivity loss, which can be unacceptable in some situations (such as downloading something important when moving in a bus). No less than the WiFi Alliance is taking interest in eliminating this technical hurdle, by working on what's known as "Passpoint". Simply put, WiFi Passpoint technology lets clients move between physical hotspots without renegotiation (security and DHCP), making the movement seamless, and resulting in little or no connectivity loss, again, provided there's no dead-zone between the coverage areas of the hotspots users are switching between. A novel concept, which will improve wireless internet service.

Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and digital home applications, today announced a technology and marketing collaboration with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) to offer Intel(R) WiDi-based products designed to enable superior wireless display consumer experience. The resulting end-to-end solution will combine Intel(R) WiDi's ease-of-use and innovation with Cavium's super low latency technology and advanced video processing techniques to further enhance Intel(R) WiDi's interactivity and broaden its target applications. As a part of the marketing collaboration, Intel and Cavium will work together to expand and grow the market for wireless display products. A range of OEMs will soon be offering Intel(R) WiDi compatible receivers with Cavium's PureVu(TM) media SoC. Live demonstrations of Cavium's new Intel(R) WiDi receivers are available at Cavium's suite at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, between Jan 10th and 13th.

Sony Corporation ("Sony") and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. ("Samsung") today announced that the two companies have signed agreements to transition the current business relationship with respect to LCD panels.

Under the agreement, Samsung will acquire all of Sony's shares of S-LCD Corporation ("S-LCD"), the two companies' LCD panel manufacturing joint venture, making S-LCD a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung. In consideration for the share transfer, cash consideration of approximately KRW 1.08 trillion* will be paid to Sony by Samsung. Concurrently, the two companies have entered into a new strategic agreement for the supply and purchase of LCD panels with a goal of enhancing the competitiveness of both companies. The agreement also allows Sony and Samsung to continue cooperative engineering efforts focused on LCD panel technology.

Here's a development that will bring joy to those that prefer to hear mechanical noises from their hard discs instead of the inky silence of the new solid state drives. The current perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in today's hard discs are due to hit a brick wall within a couple of generations or so. This will finally give SSDs the chance to make mechanical drives obsolete once and for all when their capacities increase and the prices drop. To get around this, TDK intend to use lasers coupled with a high coercivity material to achieve this capacity improvement. The coercivity value of a material is a measure of how difficult it is to magnetize ie how strong the magnetizing field needs to be. A material with low coercivity, is easy to magnetize, but it can also lose its magnetic imprint (north and south domains) easily, especially with densely packed data and is easy to erase with stray magnetic fields and to some extent, physical shock. Conversely a material with a high coercivity value can be damned hard to magnetize, but will keep its magnetic imprint much more stably and crucially for data storage, can retain much smaller magnetic domains, giving rise to greatly increased storage capacity for all that ever increasing avalanche of crucial data, such as music files, dodgy videos and humungous video game installs.

At Interop Las Vegas 2009, HP and Microsoft today announced a four-year strategic global initiative to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution.

As part of their Frontline Partnership, the two companies expect to invest up to an additional $180 million in product development, professional services, as well as joint sales and marketing, to help organizations lower costs and improve productivity.

The solution, which is planned to span software, hardware, networking and services, would enable customers to improve business output and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs. This would be accomplished by streamlining communications across messaging, video and voice with connected applications and devices. HP and Microsoft also plan to provide the flexibility and control customers need to manage their communications infrastructure efficiently.