U.S. innovation is not dead, an industry panel at Design West concluded, but has shifted to new areas like technology ecosystems and the ability to add value to high-tech products during the manufacturing process.

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Nonvolatile vendor Ramtron International launched a low-energy ferroelectric random access memory chip at the DESIGN West event.

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InvenSense Inc., a supplier of motion tracking components based on MEMS technology, has announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and Globalfoundries Inc. are now dual source suppliers of its CMOS-MEMS capacity.

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RDA Microelectronics Inc. (Shanghai, China), a fabless chip company that markets RF and mixed-signal chips for cellular and broadcast communications applications, has announced the acquisition of all the baseband intellectual property from privately-held Chinese company Coolsand Holding Co. Ltd. for $46 million.

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NXP Semiconductors announced a new series of microcontrollers featuring an interconnected and flexible analog subsystem, based on the ARM Cortex-M0 processor at the DESIGN West event.

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Cosmic Software announced the immediate availability of development tools for Freescale Semiconductor's S12Z CPU Core and S12ZVH MagniV microcontroller family at the DESIGN West event.

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Oclaro, a provider of optical communications and laser products, said it agreed to merge with optical module and components vendor Opnext in an all stock deal.

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Intel accounted for 15.6 percent of the overall semiconductor market in 2011, as brisk sales of its core chips and the acquisition of Infineon AG's wireless chip business unit helped the No. 1 chip vendor achieve its highest share of the overall chip market in more than 10 years, according to market research firm IHS iSuppli.

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Nvidia will likely announce a follow-up to its recently launched Kepler platform to better address upcoming compute products and the HPC space later this year, according to an analyst.

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A consortium will demonstrate Bi-PON, a bit-interleaving protocol it says can slash thirty-fold power consumption of today’s passive optical networks.

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The diverse demands of realtime process control which must nevertheless offer a touch-enabled user-interface—from smart appliances to point-of-sale terminals to medical monitors—is best addressed by heterogeneous multi-core processors, according to Freescale Semiconductor, which introduced its new Vybrid family of microcontrollers at DESIGN West 2012.

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Eight19 Ltd. (Cambridge, England), a spin-off from the University of Cambridge chartered with producing printed plastic solar cells, has announced it has commissioned a development and roll-to-roll printing facility at its headquarters.

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As more and more MEMS sensors are showing up in mobile devices, the focus of MEMS design has begun shifting from discrete MEMS components to MEMS sensor data integration.

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Fabless chip company Ambiq Micro has announced the introduction to the market of the AM08XX and AM18XX real-time clock (RTC) chips, which the company claims are the world's lowest power RTC chips. The typical active current is between 15 and 55 nanoamperes, Ambiq said.

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poLight AS (Horten, Norway), a vendor of optical MEMS actuated autofocus lenses, has announced that it is working with Texas Instruments Inc. to produce the optical MEMS part of its TLens assembly.

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Fabless mobile multimedia chip company Movidius has signed a deal with electronics manufacturer Keen High Technologies that is expected to generate more than $25 million of equipment sales over the next three years, according to reports.

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TI will take its Keystone architecture into low power apps at Design West with single and dual-core DSPs that consume from 2 to 3.5W.

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Inside Secure, the French based security chip vendor, will demonstrate its latest near field communications-based anti-counterfeiting chip next week at the DESIGN West conference in San Jose, Calif.

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North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor capital equipment posted a book-to-bill ratio of 1.01 on a three-month average basis for February, the first time the industry has achieved a book-to-bill above parity since September of 2010, according to the fab tool vendor trade group SEMI.

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At next week’s Design West, Micron will discuss plans to broaden support around its Hybrid Memory Cube, a high profile initiative in a growing wave of 3-D chip stacks.

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