A recent research report from Strategy Analytics shows that the smartphone applications processor market grew by 58% year-on-year in Q3 2012, reaching $3.8 billion.

Qualcomm was estimated to have a 42% revenue share of the smartphone applications processor market in Q3 2012, followed by Samsung with 27%.

Revenue generated by the global smartphone applications processor market grew by 65% year-on-year in Q2 2011, according to a Strategy Analytics report.

In total, the smartphone chip market generated $1.7 billion during the quarter.

Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor have agreed a merger that’ll see 'TI' acquiring 'National' in a deal worth almost £4 billion.

TI currently has a portfolio of 30,000 products and represents around 14% of the analogue semiconductor market in terms of revenue, while National has 12,000 products and 3% of the market. The deal is expected to be finalised around the end of the year.

Qualcomm's new dual-core QSD8672 Snapdragon chip, which can run at up to 1.5GHz, will start shipping in the fourth quarter of 2010, the company said yesterday. This means manufacturers could release 1.5GHz smartphones by Christmas, although early 2011 seems more likely.

ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have formed a not-for-profit software engineering company called Linaro. It plans to make Linux-based development faster and easier, with a focus on ARM chips.

The new partnership is committed to investing in open source projects that can be used by Linux-based distributions, such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS. Its software and tools will be available for a variety of devices that utilise semiconductor System-on-Chips (SoCs), including smartphones, tablets, digital televisions, automotive entertainment and enterprise equipment.