GLG News by Semiconductor Experts (North America)

1. DOE report discusses niche applications for LED LIghting, but does not indicate when significant market growth will occur. 2. Greatest potential growth areas for LED lighting are in both interior and exterior lighting. 3. Todays niche applications are primarily in commercial buildings where...

1. Although the overall semiconductor business is only predicted to grow at a 4-6% pace for the next few year, Ethernet looks like it will continue to grow at 10% rate. 2. 10G bit ethernet will continue to grow but will not replace 1Gbit ethernet over the next few years.

Soon, there will a paradigm shift in storage.  This shift is as much driven by economics as by technological developments.  The uses of large storage in some devices will become prevalent and change our view of memory forever.

* TDK is the last independent HDD head supplier. * In order to remain competitive to vertically integrated HDD companies TDK must push magnetic recording technology.  * At the CEATEC conference in Taiwan TDK announced technology with a magnetic recording areal density of 803 Gbpsi.  *...

As the economy contracted many thought that would actually help offshore outsourcing, as the effort to reduce costs would drive more business their way.  Judging from early returns, that doesn’t appear to be the case.  On the contrary, this may well be the beginning of a sea change in the...

1. In the high power, emerging LED industry, for lighting, one of the ways the leading LED manufactuers can protect their business from becoming a commodity is to patent their technology and then vigorously protect it against copycats that infringe on their IP. 2. The leading supplier has been and...

1. LED's offer mover enrgy efficient solution than CFL for backlighting with energy savingss in the 35% to 50% area. 2. LED solutions do not have mercury in them as do the current CFL solutions, so this makes LED's a so called green technology. 3.Nichia will be main beneficiary of move to LED's...

* Hoya is a major manufacturer of glass and supplies many of the glass substrates used in mobile hard disk drives.  * In addition to substrates Hoya manufactures some hard disk media as well.  * Showa Denko has been a customer of Hoya for media substrates and is the largest...

No segment of the market is completely safe from economic woes, but key tech players are as well positioned as any to weather the storm.  This is the time to choose carefully among investments, but the tech arena today boasts solid investment choices among both large and small companies. ...

* Fujitsu is the sixth in unit shipping volume of HDD companies making 2.5-inch drives for notebook, consumer and enterprise applications.  * Fujitsu is one of the oldest companies in the HDD business and has been responsible for much technology innovation in the industry.  * Reports abound...