Finance

Sales of optoelectronics, sensors, actuators and discrete semiconductors collectively increased 9% to $63.8 billion in 2014, after rising just 1% in 2012 and 2013, according to IC Insights.

Wafer supplier IQE had 2014 revenues of £112 million with H2 revenues of £60m up 15% from H1.

Display and display processor firm AndersDX has opened a new HQ in Camden, London, with a larger engineering lab and digital signage showroom. “Anders had been at its location for over 50 years,” said sales and marketing director Paul Mullen. “The building served us extremely well, but we have outgrown what was a traditional building and now have the opportunity ...

UK-based chip design firm Sondrel is expanding its global business with investments in China targeted at sub-28nm IC designs. Sondrel has opened a design centre in Xi’an, a location where Samsung has recently invested $7.5bn in a new 10nm foundry. Sondrel’s Julian Kingsbury said the company is in the middle of “an exciting growth phase for Sondrel in China.” According ...

STMicroelectronics’ Crolles site is on strike. Apparently workers at Crolles downed tools on Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning and Thursday evening.

After 124 years in the lighting business, Philips is to spin off the product line on which the company was founded.

Google artificially skewed search results to favour its own commercial interests and harmed its customers by unilaterally reducing their revenue share percentages, according to the US FTC as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

The SEMI book-to-bill was 1.02 in February.

ARM reckons it may have a 20% share of the server IC market in five years time.

Microsemi has agreed to acquire Vitesse Semiconductor is a cash offer which values the communications chip firm at $389m. The attraction to Microsemi is likely to be Vitesse’s strength in networking and telecoms infrastructure chips which capitalise on the growth of 4G mobile services and Gigabit Ethernet enterprise networks.  Vitesse’s product technologies include switching, timing and encryption for  4G/LTE networks ...