chip maker

Work on a $4.2 billion chip plant supplying Advanced Micro Devices Inc. starts Friday in a woodsy patch of upstate New York -- across the Atlantic from AMD's sister factories and in the middle of a recession.

Even as the United States continues to bleed manufacturing jobs, AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries Inc. and its competitors in the chip industry are sinking billions into U.S. factories.

Qualcomm Inc. posted a fiscal second-quarter loss Monday on a hefty payment to rival chip maker Broadcom Corp. to end legal disputes that spanned several continents.

The settlement with Broadcom, announced late Sunday, calls for Qualcomm to pay $891 million over four years. Broadcom is a relative newcomer to the business of making chips for cell phones but proved to be a fierce legal adversary.

Shares in Texas Instruments Inc. fell Tuesday after the chip maker reported that first-quarter profit and revenue tumbled as competition heightened and demand for its chips shrank amid the recession.

In reporting financial results Monday, the company said customers have begun to whittle down inventories of TI's chips, which are used in cell phones and other gadgets. Orders for TI chips have risen each month since hitting bottom in December.

The results beat the company's own expectations as well as Wall Street's, but executives stopped short of declaring a rebound.

The value of Intel Corp. Chief Executive Paul Otellini's compensation package rose slightly to $12.4 million in 2008, a year in which the chip maker's profit was whacked by a global slowdown in personal computer sales.

However, a large part of his 2008 compensation came from options that currently have little value because of a decline in Intel's stock price.

Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one.

Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling flights.

More compelling, however, is Laura's ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.

Despite having watched its profit virtually vanish in the fourth quarter, Intel, the world's largest chip maker, remains committed to spending billions of dollars on new manufacturing sites and attacking rivals in new markets.

Hewlett-Packard Co. surprised Wall Street on Tuesday by saying its earnings will be slightly above analysts' expectations, going against the grain as other technology bellwethers have slashed forecasts and posted weak results in the sagging economy.

Its shares climbed more than 12 percent in morning trading.

Many of the problems facing Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are of its own making. But the limited choices the chip maker has for solving its troubles are symptoms of an affliction sweeping through Silicon Valley.

Slumping sales, big layoffs and devastated stock prices are becoming the norm, resurrecting memories of the malaise that gripped the Valley for years after the dot-com meltdown in 2000.

A former Intel Corp. engineer has been charged with stealing trade secrets worth $1 billion from the chip maker while he worked for its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Toshiba, Japan's largest chip maker, reported a quarterly loss on Wednesday after the global economic slowdown aggravated a glut in the market for chips used to store data in consumer electronics.

The net loss was yen26.8 billion, or about $275 million, in the three months that ended Sept. 30, compared with a yen25 billion profit a year earlier, the company said. Sales fell 7 percent to yen1.88 trillion.

Toshiba joins Samsung Electronics and Sony among electronics makers reporting lower earnings this month.