The chip sector has many specialized vendors, some regularly hit by cyclical swings in the business. Others with ample cash reserves or borrowing power are snapping up smaller players, betting they can quickly make better returns on their money than other investments.

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The engineer, whose name hasn’t been disclosed, explained his plans to other engineers and at least one senior manager involved with the project, known as Street View, in 2008, the FCC report states. Nevertheless, it says, Street View managers told the agency they didn’t learn the Google cars were collecting the personal information until 2010.

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Mr. Chambers, who was responding to a question at a Wall Street Journal event, didn’t cite any specific actions by Huawei, which competes with Cisco in sales of networking equipment. But he suggested that, by contrast, Cisco is considered trustworthy by governments around the world.

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The Silicon Valley company has for several months been pitching media companies on a plan to create a “virtual cable operator,” which would offer their U.S. TV channels nationwide over the Internet in a bundle similar to subscriptions sold by cable- and satellite-TV operators, according to people familiar with the effort. Intel wouldn’t provide Internet access, which subscribers would obtain separately.

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People familiar with the matter say that AMD — for decades a distant second to Intel in microprocessor chips — also flirted with the possibility of buying Calxeda, another start-up developing technology for energy-efficient servers.

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The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said it will pay $334 million for SeaMicro Inc., a company known for products called micro servers that pack together many chips in ways that save space and energy. Such products are particularly popular among companies that buy servers in huge volumes to run popular consumer websites.

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The Silicon Valley company on Wednesday is announcing a $100 million venture capital fund to accelerate technology innovation in cars. Intel said it will also establish a product development center in Germany that will focus on the field.

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A year later, it isn’t clear whether the software giant’s shift will do much to improve its lagging position in mobile devices — or whether it is quite as ominous for Intel as it originally appeared.

On Monday night, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is set to return to the stage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he laid out the company’s plans for the new software, known as Windows 8. He isn’t expected to demonstrate any new features or give details about its progress.

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The Internet giant said Thursday it has lined up LG Electronics Inc. to join its roster of TV makers supporting Google TV. It also provided additional details about plans for the first products from Samsung Electronics Co. and Vizio Inc., which had previously said they would adopt the Google technology.

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U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark on Friday canceled a Feb. 14 trial in the high-profile case filed by New York’s attorney general, who charged Intel with monopolistic tactics in the market for microprocessor chips.

The order followed a letter to the judge from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who proposed dropping the federal case in view of recent developments that reduced the amount of damages that New York could seek. Mr. Schneiderman said his office would instead pursue damages in New York state court to address “Intel’s egregious and illegal conduct.”

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That would be the unit that sells graphics chips to dedicated PC gamers and others that pay top dollar for blazing speed. Its latest offering is definitely styled as a silicon Ferrari, not a Honda Civic.

“A single one of these is the fastest thing on the planet,” says Devon Nekechuk, a product manager at the AMD operations in Canada, acquired as part of the 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies.

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The vast majority of servers — including those from H-P — use the chips sold by Intel and AMD that are based on a technology called x86. But HP, which jointly developed Itanium with Intel in the 1990s, continues to use that chip for three lines of large systems used for heavy-duty computing jobs.

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Rambus had sought $4 billion in direct damages for the harm it allegedly suffered in the case, an amount that can be instantly tripled under California law. It also asked for punitive damages.

Rambus, a Silicon Valley designer of technology used in memory chips, accused Micron and Hynix of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to prevent Rambus technology from gaining traction in the market and fixing the price of memory chips.

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The technology allows Internet browsers to display jazzed-up images and effects that react to users’ actions, delivering game-like interactivity without installing additional software. Developers can use HTML5 to get their creations on a variety of smartphones, tablets and PCs without tailoring apps for specific hardware or the online stores that have become gatekeepers to mobile commerce.

That promise—and the lure of Apple Inc. devices in particular—is sweeping aside alternative technologies. In the latest development, Adobe Systems Inc. said Wednesday it will pull back on pushing the rival Flash format opposed by Mr. Jobs for mobile devices.

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The San Diego-based company, known for selling communications chips as well as licensing patents to handset makers, also said it is reaping the benefits as consumers in emerging markets adopt cellphones that use faster 3G cellular networks.

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Thursday the leader of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s board reversed his position on Leo Apotheker, a man Mr. Lane has known for 20 years and last fall called “ideally suited” to run H-P. The two men were appointed at the same time and worked closely together during Mr. Apotheker’s 11-month tenure as CEO. He was ousted Thursday.

In a 2010 interview, Mr. Lane, now 64 years old, said one reason he joined H-P’s board was the chance to work with Mr. Apotheker. He subsequently helped engineer a restructuring of the board that in January removed four directors and named five new ones.

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When Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. reports its second-quarter results Thursday, all eyes will be on how the U.S. cellphone maker is handling its separation from the more stable network-technology business, which now exists as Motorola Solutions Inc. Since the Jan. 4 split, Mobility’s shares are down 26 percent while Solution’s shares are up 15 percent.

The split-up was made possible by a recovery at the cellphone unit, which came back from years of internal turmoil to sell nearly 14 million smartphones last year — largely thanks to a joint effort with Verizon Wireless and Google Inc. That three-way partnership produced the Droid lineup and captured consumers who were yearning for an iPhone-like device but couldn’t or didn’t want to switch to the Apple Inc. phone’s exclusive U.S. carrier at the time, AT&T Inc.

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s search for a new chief executive has entered its seventh month, a delay seen as an indicator of the challenges facing the chip maker’s next leader.

A number of prominent executives—including Michael Capellas, the former chief of WorldCom Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp., and William Nuti, chief executive of computer maker NCR Corp.—have turned down approaches by AMD since the company’s board forced out its leader in January, people familiar with the situation said.

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“We were too complex,” Mr. Chambers told a gathering at a company event here that drew more than 15,000 customers and other attendees. “You will see us leaner and more focused.”

Mr. Chambers said the reorganization, which the company has been promising since mid-May, will cut the number of groups involved in developing new products. For example, multiple groups that create operating systems for Cisco will be combined into one, he said. The company also will streamline Cisco’s sales organization, Chambers said.

“The market is changing, and we are going to change faster than anyone else,” Mr. Chambers said.

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On Tuesday the Silicon Valley giant is expected to announce an overhaul of its most popular product, a switching system called the Catalyst 6500 that it estimates has generated $42 billion in revenue since 1999.

The hardware is a mainstay for linking computers together on corporate networks—and a big target for competitors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., whose rivalry with Cisco has become increasingly intense. Cisco, which is unveiling the new technology this week at a company event in Las Vegas, hopes to keep customers from defecting by offering them an easy way to upgrade.

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The system, being built in the city of Chongqing over the next two to three years, is among the largest and most sophisticated video surveillance projects of its kind in China and perhaps the world. Dubbed “Peaceful Chongqing,” it is planned to cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles, an area more than 25 percent larger than New York City.

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The Milpitas, Calif. company sprung from the spinoff of the manufacturing operations of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and was later combined with Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd.

Globalfoundries said Chief Executive Doug Grose, a former AMD executive who spent 25 years at International Business Machines Corp., will step down and become a senior advisor to the company. Chief Operating Officer Chia Song Hwee, Chartered’s former CEO, will step down in August and return to Singapore, the company said.

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The computer maker Thursday said it built an integrated circuit from graphene that operates at up to 10 gigahertz, suggesting even higher frequencies were possible–-up in the ranges favored for applications like military communications.

Perhaps more significantly, IBM said the research showed proved that graphene can be fabricated on a wafer–-the technique used in making ordinary chips–-and that a graphene transistor can be bonded with components made with conventional materials. Those have been big challenges in working with the material so far.

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The Livermore, Calif., company on Tuesday claimed a breakthrough in using the material to fabricate light-emitting diodes, the new-wave components that are finding a place in many lighting applications because of their superior energy-efficiency and longevity. A key barrier to their wider use is high cost–$40 price tags aren’t uncommon for 60-watt equivalent bulbs–and that’s where silicon could come in.

Most LEDs are now fabricated on substrates of relatively costly materials such as sapphire or silicon carbide. Many companies are putting most of their efforts in trying to use larger substrates of the same materials to drive down costs, says Bill Watkins, Bridgelux’s CEO.

A more radical approach is to move to silicon, the foundation of computer chips. Besides the cost advantage of the material, the approach could theoretically make use of the many older semiconductor factories that are inexpensive to operate.

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