Samsung shares have risen more than two per cent after Apple’s bid to ban its Galaxy products in the U.S. was rejected. The U.S. court ruling deprived iPhone and iPad maker Apple of crucial leverage in a global patent battle between the two companies, paving the way for Samsung to sustain its strong smarpthone sales momentum. The two companies are battling... 

Steel producer ArcelorMittal South Africa (Mittal) has confirmed that it is supporting an initiative to erect up to six wind turbines to supply renewable energy to its Saldanha Steel plant, in the Western Cape. The project is being pursued in partnership with Isivunguvungu Wind Energy Converter (I-WEC), which recently unveiled a 52-m mould, which will be used to manufacture wind turbine blades... 

The Global Electricity Initiative (GEI) was launched in Durban on Tuesday, bringing together 25 utilities from around the world to collaborate on climate change, while the international negotiations on climate change continued in parallel. The utilities, including South Africa’s Eskom, represent some 10% of global electricity sales with over two-million employees and 296-million customers. The... 

South Africa’s national oil company PetroSA and iGas, which is a subsidiary of the State-owned Central Energy Fund, are investigating the feasibility of importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), Energy Minister Dipuo Peters has confirmed. In a reply to a Parliamentary question, she said the department was aware that private companies were also investigating the option. South Africa’s Integrated... 

Scarcity of metals and minerals will become more severe in the next five years, with the automotive, chemicals and energy industries likely to be hit hardest, according to a global survey of company executives by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The survey of 69 executives across seven sectors, published on Wednesday, found that European companies were most concerned about a shortage, with 71% of... 

With what appears to be the imminent demise of Phobos-Grunt, Russian space agency Roscosmos has had a decidedly mixed year. In spite of many notable triumphs, including the first Soyuz launches from Kourou in French Guiana, and a number of successful launches into Earth orbit, Roscosmos faces a massive reorganisation. Phobos-Grunt is an interplanetary probe, designed to circle Mars before... 

In Singapore, the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and 3D wafer-stacking firm Tezzaron Semiconductor will jointly develop and exploit through-silicon interposer (TSI) technology. Interposers are analogous to PCBs, allow designers to integrate existing chips side-by-side on an interconnecting surface, but offering a significant performance advantage over PCBs. This so-called... 

ARM – courtesy of Qualcomm, TI and Nvidia – has been dominating the Android landscape when it comes to the underlying processor architecture, but here comes MIPS Technologies… The US processor-core provider is now powering a tablet based on Android 4.0 (the ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ sandwich release) – the NOVO7, which it claims to be a Tablet first. The MIPs core... 

Picochip, has launched its next generation of femtocell base station chips: PC3024 for enterprise use and the PC3032 for metro and rural cells. Fabbed by TSMC, the devices are made on a 40nm process and include a 1GHz ARM11 processor plus Picochip’s existing PHY and software. “They offer industry’s best security, significantly exceeding 3GPP TR 33.820 with ARM TrustZone, 4,096... 

The $2.24bn Q3 2011 market for applications processors in smartphones represented a 59% increase on the Q3 2010 market, says Strategy Analytics.   Qualcomm dominates the market with almost 50% market share, followed by Samsung, TI, Marvell, Broadcom and Nvidia.   Qualcomm’s APQ range helped it to a 4.3% share of the stand-alone apps processor market and helped Qualcomm to address...