a3e-tech

TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Toshiba Corp. (6502.TO) plans to take full ownership of an LCD panel-making joint venture with Panasonic Corp. (6752.TO), a person familiar with the matter said Saturday.
Toshiba, which has a 60% stake in Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., is to purchase the remaining shares from Panasonic for "several billions of yen," the person said, declining to elaborate.
Panasonic wasn't available for immediate comments.
Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology was established in 2002 by combining the LCD businesses of Toshiba and Panasonic, which was then called Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. It makes LCD panels used for such devices as cellular phones and car navigation systems.
After turning the joint venture into its wholly-owned subsidiary, Toshiba aims to overhaul the struggling joint venture by shifting focus to polycrystalline silicon panels, which offer higher quality images for high-end products, from amorphous silicon panels, the person said.
The joint venture is expected to lose Y30 billion on an operating basis for the current fiscal year ending March 31 on top of planned revenue of Y270 billion

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.
During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.
And Nvidia and AMD will no doubt be watching the progress intently. Intel's extensive and deep relationships with computer makers could give it an inside track with customers and upset the graphics duopoly now enjoyed by Nvidia and AMD. In the last decade Intel has not competed in the standalone, or "discrete" graphics chip market where Nvidia and AMD dominate. Rather, it has been a supplier of integrated graphics, a low-performance technology built into its chipsets that offers only a minimal gaming experience. (In the 1990s, Intel introduced the i740 GPU which, in relative terms, was not a success.)
Forsyth said that there is not yet a Larrabee chip to work with--it's expected late this year or early next year--and that "a lot of key developers are still being consulted on the design of Larrabee." But Intel will offer ways for developers to test the processor, he said. "On the Intel Web site there will be a C++ prototype library. It doesn't have the speed of Larrabee but has the same functionality. Developers can get a feel for the language, get a feel for the power of the machine."
Beyond games, Intel is also trying to catch a building wave of applications that run on the many-core architectures inherent to graphics chips. Nvidia and AMD graphics chips pack hundreds of processing cores that can be tapped for not only accelerating sophisticated games like Crysis but for doing scientific research and high-performance computing tasks.
One of the largest test sites for Larrabee is Dreamworks, which will use Larrabee for rendering and animation. To date, Dreamworks had to wait overnight to get a rendering project completed. "Using (the) Nehalem (processor), Dreamworks can almost do it in real time and it is only going to better with Larrabee," said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesperson.
Larrabee is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)
"But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it's bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers," Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel's x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

Intel Corporation has sent notice to its chief competitor Advanced Micro Devices that it believes AMD has breached a patent cross-licensing agreement that the two reached in 2001. The agreement covered royalty payments by AMD in regards to aspects of the x86 instruction set used in CPUs, as well as foundry and production rights.

AMD recently spun off its Fabs in a multi-billion dollar deal involving Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) and Mubadala Development, both solely owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The deal funnelled badly needed cash and debt relief into AMD, which has been struggling for several years to compete against Intel's CPUs. It also led to the creation of GlobalFoundries, an integrated circuit foundry which will compete against the likes of TSMC and Chartered Semiconductor for business. AMD would continue to be GlobalFoundries' primary customer.

However, Intel believes that GlobalFoundries is not a subsidiary under the terms of the agreement, and is therefore not licensed to produce CPUs that use key technologies licensed under the 2001 patent cross-license agreement.

Intel also said that the structure of the deal between AMD and ATIC breaches a confidential portion of that agreement, and it has asked AMD to make the relevant portion of the agreement public, but so far AMD has declined to do so. AMD's breach could result in the loss of licenses and rights granted to AMD by Intel under the agreement.

If GlobalFoundries is not recognized as a subsidary of AMD, it will have to negotiate with Intel to secure patents that would allow it to continue to produce AMD's CPUs at its Fabs in Dresden. Intel has the option of securing a court injunction to halt production until the dispute is settled. Negotiation of a patent licensing agreement could take months, if not years.

"Intellectual property is a cornerstone of Intel's technology leadership and for more than 30 years, the company has believed in the strategic importance of licensing intellectual property in exchange for fair value. However AMD cannot unilaterally extend Intel's licensing rights to a third party without Intel's consent," said Bruce Sewell, senior vice president and general counsel for Intel.

"We have attempted to address our concerns with AMD without success since October. We are willing to find a resolution but at the same time we have an obligation to our stockholders to protect the billions of dollars we've invested in intellectual property".

In a filling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AMD stated Intel "purports to terminate the Company's rights and licenses under the Cross License in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected".

Intel claims that in response to the material breach notification it sent out, AMD claimed Intel breached the agreement by notifying AMD of its breach.

AMD defended itself, with Harry Wolin, AMD's Senior Vice President and General Counsel, stating that Intel's unilateral "purported attempt to terminate the Company’s rights and licenses under the Cross License itself constitutes a material breach of the Cross License by Intel".

Under the terms of the license agreement, the notification to AMD means the two parties will attempt to resolve the dispute through third party mediation.

A single check box deep in the guts of the next version of Windows is giving Microsoft watchers a peek at how the software maker plans to keep European antitrust regulators from marring a crucial software launch.

Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista, isn’t expected to reach consumers until next year, but more than a million people are already testing early versions. A pair of bloggers tinkering with settings stumbled upon one they hadn’t seen before: The ability to “turn off” Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft lost a long-running battle with EU antitrust regulators in 2007 over the way it bundled media player software into the Windows operating system. The dust had barely settled when a similar claim was filed, this time over Internet Explorer’s place inside Windows. Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian competitor, claimed the practice gives Microsoft’s browser an unfair advantage.

In a preliminary decision in January, the EU agreed. Since then, makers of the open-source browser Firefox and Google Inc., which entered the browser market six months ago, have offered to provide more evidence that Microsoft is stifling competition.

In the media player dispute, the EU heavily fined Microsoft and forced it to sell a version of Windows without the offending program installed. This time, Microsoft appears to be offering the check-box solution as a way to head off a similar ending.

The company declined to comment Friday on the connection between the check boxes and the EU’s preliminary decision. But in a recent quarterly filing, it said the European Commission may order PC makers to install multiple browsers on new PCs and force Microsoft to disable parts of its own Internet Explorer if people chose a competing browser.

The check boxes, which were described on Microsoft enthusiast blogs http://www.aeroxp.org and http://www.chris123nt.com, also give Windows 7 users a way to disable the media player and hard-drive search programs, among other components, both of which have drawn scrutiny from regulators.

After Windows Vista landed with a thud, Microsoft needs a hit, said Michael Cherry, an analyst for the research group Directions on Microsoft. Beyond appeasing the EU, he said he didn’t see much use for the Internet Explorer check box.

“Windows 7 is becoming more and more important for Microsoft,” he said in an interview. “You don’t want anything that gives anyone even a doubt as to whether or not they should upgrade.”