Smart card producers Samsung Electronics, Philips and Infineon were fined €138 million (about US$181 million) by the European Commission on Wednesday for forming a cartel. Renesas, also part of the cartel, escaped a fine by revealing the existence of the cartel.
European antitrust regulators fined nine semiconductor manufacturers more than €331 million (US$404 million) on Wednesday following a years-long investigation into price fixing in the market for DRAM memory chips.
Intel has been on a buying binge lately. Just two weeks ago the world's largest chip maker agreed to acquire security vendor McAfee for $7.68 billion, and today it announced plans to buy Infineon Technologies' Wireless Solutions (WLS) division for $1.4 billion.