From EETimes: In an effort to grow its presence in the medical, lighting, and industrial markets and gain high-voltage process technology expertise, Microchip Technology Inc. has agreed to acquire Supertex Inc. for $394 million in cash.

Supertex [Sunnyvale, Calif.] is a niche analog and mixed...

From PC World: Advertising is about to land in the Firefox browser, at least for new users. Upcoming versions of Firefox will include sponsored advertising in the browser's new tab page, according to an announcement by the Mozilla Foundation.

Typically, the new tab page includes a selection of a...

From DailyTech: ARM Holdings Plc (LON:ARM) is pushing hard for chipmakers to switch to the 64-bit ARMv8-A instruction set to help it with its fledgling server market push. As a result it appeared to temporarily freeze 32-bit releases, funneling useful technology into 64-bit cores -- namely the...

From X-bit Labs: The chips are used by warfighters in everything from radios, remote sensors and even phones are of very low cost and are pervasive throughout the battlefield. These electronics have become necessary for operations, but it is almost impossible to track and recover every device. At...

From EETimes: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has created a special interest group to foster the adoption of nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM), which it sees as the early days of computing architectures that combine storage and memory as a single entity.

Launched during the SNIA Annual...

From PC World: Microsoft's getting ready to follow Amazon, Apple, and Google into the reading game with an app for Windows to peruse e-books, magazines, and comics. The new app appears be part of Microsoft's cross-platform Xbox entertainment services, which currently include Xbox Music and Video...

From DailyTech: Sony has announced a new bundle that will include the new “slim” PlayStation Vita and Borderlands 2. Sony hasn’t given an exact launch date for the new bundle, but did say that it will be available in the U.S. this spring.

The bundle will include the new PCH-2000 series PS Vita...

From X-bit Labs: The ultra-high-definition (UHD) video is not coming only to living rooms and cabinets, it is coming to every device possible, catalyzing new levels of performance across the continuum of computing devices. NPD DisplaySearch predicts that as many as 23 million of smartphones with...

From EETimes: The new director of Intel Labs vowed to run a tight ship in his first public outing, a press conference describing papers on low-power interconnects and security techniques it will present at this week's International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

The 1,000-person group aims to "be...

From PC World: PC owners probably don’t give firmware updates much thought and rarely, if ever, seek them out directly. Enthusiasts and small businesses running low-end servers, on the other hand, have a keener interest in firmware since sometimes skipping an update can be fatal for their investment...