Poor old Tsinghua has had another investment bid rejected – this time by the Taiwan assembly house SPIL (Siliconware Precision Industries). Tsinghua had offered to buy 25% of SPIL for $600 million. The sale to Tsinghua would have thwarted a bid by fellow Taiwanese assembly company ASE to take over SPIL. The Taiwan Fair Trade Commission is currently considering two ...

After Micron bought Elpida it was expected that the memory industry would consolidate around four players Samsung, Micron, Toshiba/SanDisk and Hynix. But, according to Bernstein analyst Mark Newman, Samsung’s strategy is to expand its shares of the DRAM and NAND markets from its current 40% to 50% each. This will hit competitors Hynix and Micron hard because Samsung is ahead ...

Another semiconductor company is using crowd-funding to find the investment needed to bring a product to production and into the commercial market. Lime Microsystems has started a crowd-funding campaign to bring their LimeSDR software defined radio platform into full-scale production. The company is hoping to raise $500,000 to fund the final stages of development and mass production of the LimeSDR. ...

Amazon had Q1 sales of $29 billion for a profit of $513 million. Its cloud service had revenues of $2.57 billion representing about 30% of the cloud services market leaving cloud rivals Google and Microsoft trailing. The cloud business had profits of $604 million in Q1. It delivers 56% of the operating income at Amazon with revenues representing 9% of ...

There was an interesting question at the ST results meeting earlier this week: “There was recently a Bloomberg report regarding the contract of the CEO,” asked an analyst, “if – I think your contract is expiring somewhere in May – and there were rumors – STM a new CEO. Any comments there or did I miss here something?” The last ...

Cypress Semiconductor has agreed to acquire Broadcom’s wireless product business aimed at internet of things markets in an all-cash transaction valued at $550m. This means Cypress will acquire Broadcom’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee IoT product lines and intellectual property, along with its WICED brand and developer ecosystem. The IoT business employs approximately 430 people and generated $189m in revenues during the last twelve ...

Many electronics companies have won Queen’s Awards, for innovation, international trade and sustainable development. Sorry if we missed you out The list is long and sometimes hard to interpret. To be added on to the list for Queen’s Awards, please comment below if we’ve missed you. East region Argon Design, Cambridge, innovation: Verification of video decoders for high definition (HD 4K) video. ...

Apple’s seemingly relentless march to ever increasing sales has halted according to its latest quarterly figures. It’s fiscal 2016 second quarter (ending March 26) saw a 14% drop in quarterly sales of $50.56bn, down from $58bn last year. This represents the first fall in sales since 2003. Apple’s quarterly profits fell 22% from $13.5bn to $10.5bn. In terms of products, sales of ...

24 years ago a company set up to make a roll-up OLED screen. Two private equity firms, Hilman and Kelso, in vested $133 million. Intel and others put in VC money. Philips and Uniax bought licences. Twelve years after founding, in 2004, it had an IPO on the NASDAQ which valued the company at $230 million. But, three years later, ...

I didn’t realise that together sodium and potassium make low-melting point alloys. And that they have been used to cool all sorts of things, including spacecraft, atomic reactors and even PCs – the latter in the form of the LMX Superleggera heatsink assembly from Danamics, which looks to have gone bust. And, according to the ever-delightful Wikipedia, it has even been used ...