Sony to sell chip facility to Toshiba for $835 mln
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Sony Corp  said on Wednesday it will sell its microchip production facilities in western Japan to Toshiba Corp  for 90 billion yen ($835 million), in their latest move to focus on their core businesses.
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(InfoWorld) - Koninklijke Philips Electronics has completed the sale of an 80.1 percent stake in its chip division to a group of private investment houses, the company said Saturday. The stake in NXP Semiconductors, theÂ new nameÂ of the chip unit,Â was sold to a groupÂ including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), Silver Lake Partners, and AlpInvest Partners. Philips expects to take in â¬6.4 billion ($8.12 billion) in cash from the sale, after taxes. The European electronics giant will keep a 19.9 percent share of the business. Philips said the deal places the value of NXP at â¬8.3 billion. There have been a number of chip industry deals this year, including aÂ $17.6 billion offer for Freescale SemiconductorÂ last month. In July,Â Intel soldÂ its communications and application processor business to Marvell Technology Group for $600 million, while earlier this year,Â PMC-Sierra acquiredÂ the storage semiconductor business formerly owned by Agilent Technologies for $425 million.
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Capacity at Japanese plant to increase 7.5% to meet demand from digital camera, cell phone makers. TOKYO  - Toshiba Corp.
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Sony Corp said Thursday that it had agreed to sell its production lines for the powerful computer chip at the heart of its struggling PlayStation 3 game console to rival Toshiba Corp.
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Toshiba Corp. (6502.T) said on Tuesday it  would replace about 340,000 laptop computer batteries made by  Sony Corp. (6758.T) worldwide, the latest in a string of Sony  battery woes.
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Toshiba Corp.  said it would buy microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. , ending its exclusive ties with Intel Corp.  for the supply of the brains that run computers, and sending its shares higher.
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Japanese consumer electronics maker Sony  Corp  said on Tuesday it will spend 22 billion yen  ($203.5 million) to develop technology to make medium to large  organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels.
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(InfoWorld) - Toshiba Corp. is expanding production of NAND flash memory chips faster than originally planned, the company said Monday. The company is one of the world's largest producers of flash memory chips, which are used in a wide range of consumer electronics products including digital still cameras, music players, cell phones and memory cards. At present most of Toshiba's production in its number-three chip factory is done on a manufacturing line that can make chips with features as small as 70 nanometers but in January the company began using a more advanced 56-nanometer production process. The 56-nanometer technology means chips can be made physically smaller so more fit on a wafer and made more efficient. This means the resulting chips are cheaper and use less power. Toshiba had planned to increase 56-nanometer production so it equalled half of the company's 135,000 wafer per month output by the end of this year but now Toshiba is planning to meet that point in September. The faster-than-anticipated switch to new production should make Toshiba's NAND flash more competitive on the global market. The Tokyo company also said it plans to re-equip its number-four chip fabrication facility to handle 56-nanometer production. The new building will have a clean-room production area about 40 percent bigger than the number-three factory.
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Already a partner with IBM and Sony in the development and production of the Cell BE processor that powers the PS3, Toshiba this morning stated it's joining IBM and its partners on HK+MG. But IBM says this is a different track.
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LONDON, November 29  - IBM (IBM.NYS), Sony (SON1) and Toshiba (TSE1) today unveiled key details of a new computer chip called Cell, being jointly developed by the three companies.
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Sony Corp.  will cut back on future chip spending and may not produce advanced chips used in its PlayStation 3 (PS3) in-house, a senior executive said on Tuesday, in a move aimed at driving the semiconductor unit's nascent earnings recovery.
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Toshiba Corp said on Tuesday it would join a group led by International Business Machines Corp to develop system chips using 32-nanometre circuitry, as chip makers increasingly team up to cut development costs.
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(InfoWorld) - The Cell processor sits at the heart of a high-performance computer from IBM and the PlayStation 3,Â and now Toshiba Corp. wants to put that power into mobile devices and cell phones. A roadmap for the processor on display by Toshiba at this week's Ceatec show in Japan shows a more powerful version of the chip under development for 2007. While details of the chip were not available, a source close to Toshiba said that the new device will be manufactured using more advanced 65-nanometer production technology. The current chips are being made on a 90-nanometer line and the switch will mean lower power consumption and increased performance. Looking further ahead the roadmap calls for further increases in power between next year and the end of the decade. At the same time "mid-class" versions of the processor are also envisaged for 2008 and beyond and a mobile version in 2010. The Cell chip is the product of a joint development project by Toshiba, IBM, Sony Corp. and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI). Each chip contains a main processor and eight sub-processors to deliver about 200G Flops (floating point operations per second) of power. It will make its consumer debut next month when SCEI puts the PlayStation 3 on sale in Japan and the U.S. but Toshiba has plans for the chip in other parts of the living room. "As the first application we are focused on the consumer electronics area such as media servers or something like that but Cell itself is not restricted to that area," said Mitsuo Saito, chief fellow at Toshiba's semiconductor company and one of the key creators of the chip, in an interview at Ceatec. "Maybe other partners are going onto the very high-end. We are focusing on the low power area. One is for more mobile types of applications such as small games or some mobile phone-like systems," he said. When the Cell partners disclosed details of the chip in 2004 both Toshiba and Sony said they planned to put the device into consumer electronics products by 2006. Toshiba said its plans have been delayed but remain very much in-place while Sony said it is currently concentrating on getting the Cell into the PlayStation 3 and will look at other uses once the games console is launched. Toshiba's Saito said the three partners are also collaborating on the software side so that Cell-based software won't end up tied to specific versions of the chip. "Also, maybe the most important thing is to have collaboration, he said. "Each type of Cell has to have the same basis of software so for this purpose we are doing a lot of effort to centralize software from the very small Cell to the very large one to have a uniform world. It's our plan to expand to that kind of area. That is a very important aspect so we are collaborating together, three companies, to enhance the Cell world." Â  Additional reporting by Sumner Lemon.
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TOKYO - Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc said Tuesday it will begin selling a personal digital assistant Sept 25 equipped with an organic electroluminescent display, a next-generation monitor.
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Japanese consumer electronics maker Sony  Corp (6758.T) said on Tuesday it will spend 22 billion yen  ($203.5 million) to develop technology to make medium to large  organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels.
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Toshiba Corp, Japan&#39;s second largest chipmaker, has agreed to start selling a type of semiconductor known as flash memory to Apple Computer Inc, maker of the best-selling iPod digital music player.
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(InfoWorld) - Toshiba will sell its entire stake in record company Toshiba EMI, one of Japan's largest music publishers, it said Thursday. The stake will be purchased by EMI GroupÂ for Â¥21 billion ($179 million), of which about Â¥13 billion will see its way to Toshiba's pretax profit this year. Toshiba said it is selling the stake because its involvement in the music business is less relevant to other businesses in the group than it was in the past. The sale is expected to be completed before the end of Toshiba's current financial year in March 2007.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.