EmergingTech from Japan

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In pursuit of more agile management, Panasonic Corp. announced it will completely absorb Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. and Panasonic Electric Works Co., Ltd. and will acquire these two listed subsidiaries through takeover bids.

CEATEC Japan 2010, Japan's largest electronics show, will be held from October 5 to 9 at Makuhari, in the suburbs of Tokyo. Hit by not only the global recession but also by a typhoon that struck bang in the middle of last year's show, the event ended up with 150,000 visitors, about 3/4 of the previous year's attendance. For this year, the CEATEC organizer is expecting about 200,000 visitors, the same level as that of the peak year of 2007.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) announced its wafer-bonding machine has bonded SiC wafers and GaN wafers with silicon wafers at room temperature for the first time in the industry.

Elpida Memory, Inc. has settled a pending diversification into the flash memory business by forming an alliance with Spansion Inc., which includes joint development of NAND technology and products and foundry services for the US company.

The Committee of High-purity Silicon, a wafer industry organization consisting of the world's major wafer manufacturers, revised the forecast of this year's single-crystal wafer production in Japan from 8,265 tons issued last February to 8,624 tons, reflecting brisk production in the first half of this year. Accordingly, production is expected to increase 35.9% from 2009, 5.9 percentage points up from 30% in the February forecast.

The long-rumored sale of the semiconductor unit of Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. has been settled with ON Semiconductor Corp. The US company will purchase the unit for US$367 million by the end of this year.

Hitachi, Ltd. and KDDI Corp. announced they have jointly developed a mobile phone with an RFID read/write function and intend to start marketing next year, initially aiming at business use.

The rationale of Renesas Electronics Corp.'s US$200 million deal with Nokia is that the Finnish company's proven modem technology will be Renesas's passport to the global mobile communication chip market. By exploiting this advantage, Renesas aims to capture a third of the global LTE chip market while expanding its mobile LSI business fourfold to 400 billion yen (US$4 billion*) by fiscal 2015 from the fiscal 2009 level.

ULVAC, Inc. has started marketing a solar cell measurement system that would cut the time required to measure the conversion efficiency of a tandem thin-film solar cell substrate to about one eighth by evaluating the substrate without destroying it.

Sharp Corp. will supply thin-film solar cells for a 73MW solar power plant in Thailand-one of the world's largest solar photovoltaic schemes so far, in a US$250-million project of a consortium that includes Mitsubishi Corp., a Hong Kong electricity utility and a Thai independent power producer. The plant in Lop Buri Province is scheduled to begin operation by the end of 2011 and will sell electricity to the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand for 25 years.