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br> Mosaid Technologies announced the settlement of its patent litigations with Infineon Technologies and that both Infineon and its memory products spin-off, Qimonda, have licensed the Mosaid patent portfolio. Mosaid has also purchased 50 patents from Infineon and Qimonda.

Spansion said it plans to spend $1.2 billion to build a new flash memory production line in Japan. First output is expected by mid-2008.The new line is expected to have the capacity to process up to 20,000 300-mm wafers a month and will be Spansion's first 300-mm line.

Wafer manufacturer Sumco announced that it has reached an agreement with Komatsu to acquire a 51% stake in its silicon wafer subsidiary, Komatsu Electronic Metals for ¥36.9 billion (about $320.4 million U.S.). The acquisition will make Sumco similar in size to top wafer supplier Shin-Etsu Handotai.

Sumco had net sales of ¥1.702 trillion ($15.035 billion U.S.) in fiscal year ended Mar. 31, 2006. Komatsu Electronic Metals (KEM) had net sales of ¥86.6 billion ($765 million) over the same period.

The Bosch Group is investing some 550 million euros in the construction of a new manufacturing facility for 200 mm semiconductors at its site in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart. Construction of the facility is to begin in the autumn of 2007. Rollout of production is planned for mid-2009. The plant will have a total capacity of up to 1,000 silicon wafers per day, equivalent to a daily production volume of up to one million microchips. Bosch has been manufacturing 150-mm semiconductors in Reutlingen for ten years now. In total, some 800 jobs will be created in the new 200-mm semiconductor manufacturing facility by 2012.

Semiconductor and micromachined chips from Reutlingen are used above all in the automobile industry. As components in electronic control units, they form the "central nervous system" of many functions in the vehicle, including electronic safety systems such as ABS, ESP, or airbags, fuel-efficient and clean engines with electronic engine management, or modern driver assistance systems.

The new 200-mm wafer fab in Reutlingen will mainly be geared to the "smart power process." In this technology, integrated circuits combine on one chip highly sensitive signal processing and high-voltage circuits for the control of high-performance actuators.

In the initial stages, these structures will be 0.35 micrometers wide. At a later stage, Bosch plans to halve structure width to 0.18 micrometers.

BridgeCo, a provider of processor and middleware platforms that connect consumer electronics to computers and the Internet over home networks, raised $23M. The financing round was led by Advent Venture Partners and Wellington Partners, who were joined by all of BridgeCo’s Series C investors: Benchmark Capital, Cipio Partners (formerly Infineon Ventures), Earlybird Venture Capital, Fidelity Ventures and Intel Capital. The company also announced the opening of their new global headquarters in Los Angeles. The company’s CEO, COO, CFO and North American sales and marketing team will be based in LA, while the bulk of BridgeCo’s engineering and development team will continue to be located in Zurich, Switzerland.

Raza Microelectronics and AMD have entered into a broad strategic relationship. RMI will acquire the MIPS-based AMD Alchemy processor product line and operations from AMD, and AMD will become an investor in RMI. Raza Microelectronics is a fabless semiconductor company with more than 150 employees. The company offers a portfolio of solutions, led by the XLR(TM) Processor family -- a power-efficient solution optimized for embedded communications and networking applications -- and solutions for the next-generation Information Infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif. with subsidiaries in Beijing and Shenzhen, China, Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India.