You may not have heard of Visage Mobile, but the San Francisco company’s been on a tear of late. In the past eight months, the company – which helps clients like Nissan and Silicon Image manage their employee mobile usage and costs – has notched what it says are record sales and inked a partnership with expense-management giant Concur. And on Tuesday, Visage named a veteran of AT&T as its new president.

“I’m seeing a critical point in the mobility marketplace,” said Mani Zarrehparvar, who during his six years as a director at AT&T oversaw a $30 billion mobile phone revenue stream and helped the wireless giant develop new products.

With mobile technology being built into everything from cars to medical devices, businesses are ”going from counting devices in the hundreds of millions to the hundreds of billions,” said Zarrehparvar, 43, who worked with Visage CEO Bzur Haun before joining AT&T. Visage hopes to help companies keep track of the dollars associated with all those devices.

Haun called his old friend’s addition the capstone to “a very productive year for Visage,” which also has included an $8 million funding round led by Qualcomm and Motorola.

Speaking of funding, San Francisco venture capital firm Aberdare on Tuesday added Mohit (Mo) Kaushal as partner. A physician who also holds a Stanford MBA, Kaushal has worked for the FCC and the World Health Organization and was a member of the Obama administration’s health IT task force, working on the technology implications of Obamacare. He’s also a former VC, having notched a stint at Polaris Venture Partners. All of which should come in handy at Aberdare, which specializes in health care investing.

And while the VC fraternity welcomes a new member, another one is leaving: Sagar Pushpala on Monday announced he’d left Khosla Ventures after just 15 months to take the reins of Northern California’s only chip foundry. Telefunken Semiconductors, founded in 2008 by George Clinton as a spin-out of a German company, two years ago bought the former NEC chip plant, but things took a nosedive last year amid legal fireworks with the company’s former CEO.

From here, it looks like Pushpala – a 25-year veteran of companies like Maxim, National Semiconductor and AMD – is being brought in to play cleanup. Interestingly, Telefunken Semi is also changing its name to TSI. He says he’s already making plans to expand operations and R&D in Roseville, and a valley office may in in the works as well.

Sagar Pushpala

Integrated Device Technology, which last week announced the closing of its purchase of the Canadian chip maker, Tundra Semiconductor, said today it would reduce its workforce by about 4.1 percent after assessing its “ongoing personnel needs in light of the acquisition.”

Based on the most recent figures we could find, a combined IDT and Tundra would have about 2,350 employees, meaning the reduction in force would affect between 95 and 100 employees.

IDT estimates that it will spend between $7.8-$8.2 million in cash for severance and related costs, most of which it will write off in the current quarter. The restructuring is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Silicon Image is implementing its third layoff in a year, according to a filing today with the SEC in which the Sunnyvale chip maker disclosed its decision last Friday to get rid of about 80 employees, or 13 percent of the 610 employees it reported having at the end of 2008.

The move is expected to cost the company between $7-$9 million in cash payments related to employee severance, considerably more than the $4.6 million the company spent on such charges over the course of restructurings in announced in both its third and fourth quarter of 2008 that were described in the company’s annual 10-K financial report as being part of the company’s “program to pursue continuous improvement.”

The company — whose chips and technology are used to distribute, secure and store high-definition content — used up $15.5 million of its cash operating during its 2009 first quarter when sales dropped 40 percent from the year-before quarter to $40.5 million.

In its filing today Silicon Image  said it announced its most recent restructuring Friday, but we couldn’t find any release covering the news on its Web site.

Silicon Laboratories, the Austin maker of analog mixed-signal integrated circuits that counts local companies such as Atmel, Maxim and Cypress among its rivals, today increased its guidance for its fiscal 2009 second quarter. It now expects sales to be up 20 to 25 percent from the quarter before to a range between $101-105 million. It had previously forecast sales in the range of $92-97 million.

The company said that “visibility has improved considerably and bookings and shipping…are more consistent with healthy historical norms,” according to its release today.

Net profit per share is expected to come in between 13-16 cents a shares compared with the previous forecast of 7-11 cents.

“We are pleased with the strength of the business and believe the market share momentum we have striven to maintain is resulting in a stronger revenue profile than we initially anticipated,” said Necip Sayiner, president and CEO of Silicon Laboratories in a statement. “With more new product cycles than at any time in our history, we are increasingly confident that it will only be a matter of quarters rather than years to reach and then exceed our third quarter 2008 revenue peak.”

Silicon Valley chip competitors, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, sure don’t seem to see eye to eye on much.

The companies have been squabbling for years over AMD’s claim that Intel has monopolized the microprocessor market. And they don’t share the same view about the economic state of the semiconductor industry.

Last month, Intel CEO Paul Otellini declared that the personal-computer sales slump had “bottomed out.”

But in an interview this week with Dow Jones Newswires, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said not so fast.

“It’s still too early to definitely say we’ve hit bottom,” Meyer advised. “You can only point to the bottom once you’ve passed it, and I can’t say we’re past it.”

Will these two chip-makers every get on the same page? .

Aviza Technology, the Scotts Valley supplier of condsemiconductor manufacturing equipment, filed for bankruptcy protection this morning on behalf of itself and its subsidiaries Aviza and Trikon Technologies, according to a company release.

Last month the company’s lenders notified Aviza that it was in default on its credit agreements, demanding that it immediately pay what it owed on its loans. As of May 26, that amounted to $29.5 million, according to Aviza.

The company has also been under continuing threat of having its shares delisted from trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

In April, the company said earnings for its fiscal 2009 first quarter would be lower than expected. The company said sales would be in the range of $9.5 million to $11 million, lower than the $13 million to $18 million the company had expected. Final results for the quarter have yet to be released and the company is now late in filing its required financial report with the SEC.

The company said it has made “significant efforts” over the past several months “to reduce its expenses and working capital requirements in response to” unprecedented market conditions for its products, including work force reductions, executive salary cuts, and mandatory time off for all employees.

Aviza said it has been working with Needham & Company “to review and pursue financial and strategic options for the company to maximize value on behalf of all of the company’s stakeholders, including merging with or into another company, a sale of all or substantially all of the company’s assets, and the liquidation or dissolution of the company through bankruptcy proceedings.”

Prior to the Chapter 11 filing, Aviza said it signed a nonbinding letter of intent to sell some of its assets and businesses to Sumitomo Precision Products of Japan.

“We have been working hard to find a buyer that would best leverage our products and provide on-going support to our customers,” said Jerry Cutini, Aviza’s president and CEO, in a statement Wednesday. “Through this voluntary bankruptcy process, we can continue to operate our business and pursue an orderly transition to SPP with minimal impact on our customers and employees.”

IXYS, the Milpitas maker of semiconductors used to control electricity in power conversion systems and other power-related applications, reported a 27 percent drop in sales for its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter ended in March.

The company reported a net loss of $10.9 million for the quarter, which included a write-down of $11.9 million for excess inventory that was taken “in response to the deterioration of the business environment”. Last year, the company reported a profit of $3.1 million net profit for its fiscal 2008 fourth quarter.

The company said it would cease providing forward-looking guidance, saying that “with the changing economic conditions, we have found that our ability to project revenues has declined.”

Just over a month after the close of its fiscal 2009 second quarter, Aviza Technology has determined that “it expects not to meet its previously announced net sales and adjusted net loss guidance,” according to a release the Scotts Valley supplier of chip equipment maker filed Tuesday afternoon.

The company now expects sales for the quarter to be between $9.5-$11 million, down from the $13-$18 million range it had originally set.

The news sent its shares down just a penny in after-hours trading, according to figures found on Yahoo Finance, but given where Aviza’s shares currently trade, that amounted to a 7.5 percent loss.

Just after the start of the year, Aviza raised its profit forecast for its fiscal 2009 first quarter ended Dec. 26, 2008, even as its sales came in at the low end of expectations. The company cut 100 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce in April 2008.

Integrated Silicon Solution, the fabless San Jose chip company that designs devices used in digital consumer electronics, networking, mobile communications, and automobiles, reported a 46 percent drop in sales for its fiscal 2009 second quarter Tuesday, saying that demand weakened some more in all of its markets during the March quarter.

“However, we believe demand has now stabilized and that customers are nearing the completion of their inventory reductions,” said CEO Scott Howarth in a statement with the earnings release.

Earlier this month Integrated Silicon Solutions repriced underwater options for 208 employees, pricing them at $1.65. Since then its shares are up 30 percent, closing Tuesday at $2.15 before the company released its earnings.

In case you missed it, Applied Materials of Santa Clara, the world’s biggest manufacturer of equipment used to make computer chips, has trimmed its board members’ pay again in light of the dismal economy.

Following on its decision in December to cut the annual cash retainer of its non-employee directors by 10 percent, Applied recently reduced the retainer by another 10 percent.

For those of you counting, that whittles the board member’s individual retainer from $65,000 to $52,000.  Applied also has slashed 20 percent from the base salaries of its senior executives.