Toshiba takes Hynix to court
Tokyo: Toshiba of Japan has announced legal action against Hynix of South Korea for alleged infringement of its memory chip patents.

Toshiba has charged that Hynix infringed its patents related to NAND flash memory technology in Japan and in the US and that Hynix infringed Toshiba patents related to dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in the US.

NAND flash memory was pioneered by Toshiba and is used in portable products such as mobile phones.

More and more Japanese companies in recent times have been resorting to legal means to protect key intellectual property, particularly related to core products in which Korean companies are gaining market share.

Toshiba is the second Japanese technologies company this week and the third this month to file a suit alleging patent infringement.

Toshiba and Hynix had a cross-licensing agreement covering semiconductor patents, which came into effect in 1996, but were unable to agree on an extension after it expired in 2002.
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East Asian economic growth peaks at 7 percent
Hong Kong: The World Bank has said that East Asian economic growth rates are expected to grow more than 7 per cent in 2004 and have probably already peaked in the first half of the year.

Recovery of these countries had been supported by buoyant exports, especially to China, as well as the strong performance of the world's developed economies, a cyclical rebound in high-technology industries and a rebound in east Asian fixed investment spending.

The increased poverty generated by the crisis had finally been reversed, World Bank officials said at the launch of the report, called the East Asia Update.

"The number of poor — defined as those living on less than $2 a day — would soon fall to less than one third of the population, compared with half as recently as 1999 and around 300 million people will have escaped from poverty in the years of recovery since the financial crisis," the report said.

The World Bank also warned that the outlook was "uncertain," with East Asian growth already slowing, the region being vulnerable to high oil prices.
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IBM regains top position
New York: IBM, the world's biggest hardware manufacturer, has regained its position at the head of the Top 500 list of supercomputer installations, dislodging rival NEC Corp of Japan.

IBM, which now has 216 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers used for massive data-crunching — up from 153 a year ago — also announced plans to begin offering commercial versions of its record-breaking Blue Gene supercomputer, originally built by IBM for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency.

In independent tests, the computer handled 70.72 trillion calculations per second.

In recent years, supercomputers have changed from massive, integrated machines to distributed networks of thousands of PCs, many running Linux software, which are then chained together in order to provide a unitary calculating machine.
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