In Brief: Fujitsu to buy Spansion chip plants
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(InfoWorld) - Fujitsu will purchase two chip plants in Japan from Spansion Japan, a flash memory chip maker in which it holds a stake, the companies said Thursday. Fujitsu will pay Â¥17 billion ($145 million) to buy Spansion's JV1 and JV2 factories, which are in the city of Aizu-Wakamatsu in northeast Japan, where Fujitsu already operates its own chip factory. Fujitsu will use the plants to produce flash memory embedded microcontrollers, it said. Such chips are used in automotive and consumer electronics applications, and Fujitsu said it expects the market for the devices to grow. The company will also keep producing some flash memory chips at the factories for the time being, it said. SpansionÂ began life as a joint venture companyÂ between Fujitsu and Advanced Micro Devices, before listing its stock on the Nasdaq stock market in the U.S. late last year. ItÂ raised about $506 millionÂ in the public offering, which reduced Fujitsu and AMD's shareholdings to minority status.
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Snaps up TDS Fujitsu Services is taking a majority stake in German reseller TDS AG.â¦
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U.S. investment fund Perry Capital has offered to buy an additional 25 percent stake in ailing Japanese chip maker NEC Electronics Corp.  for 154 billion yen ($1.27 billion), a source close to the matter said on Wednesday.
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Storage vendor Network Appliance said Thursday it plans to buy Onaro, a Boston company that develops storage management software.Onaro&#39;s main product family is&#160;SANScreen. The suite&#39;s components include an engine that models the relationships between components in a distributed system; a repository that monitors the storage services that applications need; and a change repository for tracking device and service changes, according to a company white paper. The point is to help administrators improve performance and resolve problems within their storage area networks.Onaro&#39;s technology is deployed in 32 percent of the Fortune 50 companies, according to a statement. NetApp said Onaro&#39;s products are complementary to its existing offerings, which include its V-Series virtualization systems; ReplicatorX data recovery and replication software; and its Decru DataFort storage encryption appliances.NetApp said the deal will close in the first quarter of this year. Financial terms were not disclosed. Shares of NetApp stock were trading at roughly $25 Thursday morning, a rise of approximately $0.25.
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Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp.  said its quarterly net profit jumped on stock sales and raised its outlook despite chip price falls, while Fujitsu Ltd.  posted a sharp fall amid severe price competition in hard drives and lowered its sales outlook.
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Spansion, the flash memory joint venture between AMD and Fujitsu has laid out its plans to develop 8Gbit memory parts based on 65nm lithography.
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U.K. semiconductor design company Arm Holdings PLC has agreed to acquire a Sunnyvale, California, provider of components for chip manufacturing in a deal valued at around $913 million in cash and stock.
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(InfoWorld) - Taiwan's largest DRAM maker, Powerchip Semiconductor, on Monday denied a local media report that it planned to build a chip factory in China with a Japanese partner. The Chinese-language Commercial Times newspaper said Powerchip had invited Japan's Renesas Technology to jointly invest in a chip factory in China. Renesas and Powerchip currently work together in technology and chip production outsourcing pacts. Powerchip said it isn't making any China plans right now because it's too busy. "This is just a rumor, nothing has been done yet," said Eric Tang, a vice president at Powerchip. Powerchip has alreadyÂ gained approval from the Taiwan governmentÂ to invest in China, but one of the rules requires it to move used equipment from an old factory in Taiwan to its new China plant, instead of buying new machinery. The trouble is that orders at Powerchip are too brisk to consider such a move, Tang said. The company's older chip plant, called an 8-inch plant due to the size of the silicon wafers used to make chips on, is still making money in Taiwan so there's no need to move it to China right now, he said. Powerchip may buy used equipment from elsewhere and move it to China instead of using gear from its own 8-inch plant, he said. The company has no plans to move forward on the project in the near term. Taiwan and China remain enemies after splitting in 1949 amid civil war, the reason Taipei carefully regulates high tech investments to the mainland. Despite their strained relationship, China remains the favored destination for Taiwanese investment due to their shared language and culture, as well as China's lower costs and incentives for building factories.
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TOKYO: Fujitsu Ltd and Cisco Systems Inc have agreed to form a strategic alliance, focusing on routers and switches that will enable businesses to build advanced Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Strong corporate financials, eager venture capital, a liberal lending environment, and markets in transition continue to inspire buyouts and acquisitions in the IT world with Avaya and Palm beingÂ just two of the high-profile targets this week. The transition to new technology in telecom and the Web in particular opens up opportunities for vendors. Network equipment manufacturerÂ Avaya announced a dealÂ for a $8.2 billion cash buyout by private equity firms TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners on Monday. "We are starting to see more of this kind of public-firm-going-private. We've seen this with Alltel most recently and cable television companies as well," said telecom analyst Jeff Kagan. Last month, TPG and Goldman Sachs Group's private equity unitÂ bought mobile service company AlltelÂ for $27.5 billion. The Avaya deal will allow it to make a potentially costly transition from legacy TDM products to IP technology without having to worry about the quarter-to-quarter bottom line. The timing of the deal was good. Avaya shares have been doing well lately, so the buyout gives shareholders top dollar. Avaya shares rose $0.31 to close at $17.02 Tuesday. "Avaya obtained an impressive value for shareholders," said Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt. Private equity firmÂ Elevation Partners' acquisition of 25 percent of PalmÂ also caused investors to cheer. Palm rose $1.48 to close at $17.57 Monday. Palm gets a $325 million investment and also several industry leaders: Jon Rubinstein, former senior vice president of hardware engineering and head of the iPod division at Apple, as well as Apple's former CFO, Fred Anderson. It is widely hoped that Rubinstein will be able to spark new ideas at Palm, which is suffering from competition against device makers Research In Motion and Nokia. Palm last week announced the Foleo, pitched as a mobile device "companion" product, but IT investors are waiting for more of a breakthrough device for the company's aging product line. In other acquisition news,Â Flextronics International said Monday it will acquire SolectronÂ for $3.6 billion. Flextronics said the deal will streamline product development and supply chain management and create an electronics manufacturing giant with more than $30 billion in annual revenue. But Flextronics slipped $0.16 to close at $11.54 on the news. Traders sometimes dump shares of acquiring companies when deals are suspected to have a negative impact on financials. Investment firm Hilliard Lyons downgraded its rating on Flextronics from "buy" to "underperform." Meanwhile, telecom-equipment maker UTStarcom dropped $0.80 to $6.51 after announcing Monday that it had done a strategic review and decided not to seek a buyout or merger. Though new technology may bring more opportunities, it may take a while before new products and services generate significant revenue for vendors. Almost halfway through the year, moderate growth is still anticipated for global IT in 2007 and recent surveys suggest that corporate spending may be even softer than had been expected. AÂ survey from ChangeWave Research released last week, for example, reported that the percentage of companies planning to increase their spending has fallen to its lowest point in the last four years. In this environment, where capital is available but market growth is slow, IT is bound to see buyouts and acquisitions continue.
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Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today announced that Fujitsu Limited successfully optimized ARM926EJ-S(TM) and ARM946E-S(TM) processors using Cadence(R) Encounter(R) RTL Compiler and the Cadence Optimization Methodology Kit.
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Fujitsu Limited (Fujitsu), Fujitsu Microelectronics of America, Inc.  (FMA), and Jazz Semiconductor, Inc. (Jazz), a wholly owned subsidiary of  Jazz Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:JAZ), announced today that they will work  together to manufacture System-on-Chip (SoC) products for RFCMOS  devices.
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Cisco (Quote, Chart) and Fujitsu will collaborate on high-end routers and other products for Japanese carriers and corporations moving to Internet Protocol (define) systems, the companies announced.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. private investment company appears to be trying to grab a larger stake of Japan's NEC Electronics. Perry Capital has offered to increase its stake in the company, which is the chip-making subsidiary of NEC, from its current stake of around 4.5 percent to 25 percent, according to a report in Wednesday morning's Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily. NEC confirmed that it was approached by Perry Capital but would not disclose details. "NEC received a letter from an American private investment firm, Perry Capital, on July 11, 2007; however, NEC cannot comment on the contents of individual communications with investors," it said. The news comes a day after NEC said its semiconductor subsidiary is a candidate for delisting from the Tokyo Stock Exchange because too many of its shares are held by a small number of shareholders. The exchange regulations say a company cannot remain listed if more than 75 percent of its shares are held by its 10 largest shareholders. NEC Electronics has until March 2008 to adjust the shareholding, although new rules slated for later this year would change the criteria for delisting. If they come into force as expected, NEC Electronics could continue to trade with no change in its shareholder status. NEC Electronics stock ended the day up 16 percent, at a year-high of Â¥3,670.
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p&gt;Semiconductor design firm ARM (Quote, Chart) is took a major leap into the embedded microprocessor space by acquiring Artisan Components (Quote, Chart), producer of embedded memory, standard cell, input/output, analog and mixed-signal components.
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Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today announced that Fujitsu Limited has adopted Cadence(R) Encounter(R) Timing System (ETS) for timing analysis in their implementation flow.
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Fujitsu has joined the networking parade by agreeing to sell Cisco&#39;s high-end routers and switches in Japan. It should come as no surprise as the market for high-end routers heats up.