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Julius Blank, one of the pioneers in computer chip manufacturing has died. Mr. Blank was a co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the first chip manufacturers and often thought of as a model for many high tech startups and early Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Blank was 86.
Texas Instruments late Monday said it was buying out National Semiconductor. The deal, worth $6.5 billion in a straight shares-for-cash deal, was described as mutual and already approved by the boards of both companies. They expected the deal to be cleared by government regulators in six to nine months.
The Wireless Power Consortium on Thursday announced that cellphone maker Nokia has become one of its members. This is expected to result in quicker development and the more widespread use of the Qi wireless charging standard the Consortium is working on. With the addition of Nokia, the company has backed the open standards that would be shared among many makers of cell phones and other portable electronics devices.
A new organization hopes to make wireless power a widespread option for electronics in the near future. The Wireless Power Consortium hopes to develop a universal standard that would use contact plates to power portable devices by magnetically inducing an electrical charge in an attached device. The move would let users charge devices simply by placing them on a particular surface, including hidden ones, and could avoid the risk of over- or underpowering a device by using conflicting hardware.
