August 2011

Crocus announced that they acquired NXP Semiconductor's MRAM patent portfolio - which includes fundamental MRAM intellectual property rights in multiple geographies worldwide, including North America, Europe and Asia.

Crocus now holds over 100 issued and pending patents related to the magnetic semiconductor technology covering magnetic materials, devices, and design and product technology.

Kiyoshi Kobayashi, president of Toshiba's Semiconductor and Storage Products Company, said that "MRAMs will make it possible to take further advantage of NAND flash memories and HDDs, whose access performances are low,". It seems that Toshiba plans to use MRAM as cache for both NAND and HDDs devices.

Toshiba hasn't given up on the idea of having a full MRAM memory device - replacing HDD/NAND/DRAM altogether, but using it as a cache can be a step towards this goal.

Samsung announced that it has acquired Grandis, developer of STT-MRAM technology. We do not have any financial details yet, but Grandis' CEO Frahad Tabrizi said that this deal serves as a& "very successful exit" for Grandis's investors. Grandis raised $15 million since it was founded in 2002 (and also raised about the same from DARPA grants including a $8.6 million second-phase project granted in June 2010).

Grandis licensed their technology to several companies. We know that Hynix licensed it in 2008. The company was also collaborating with Renesas technologies. Hynix and Grandis were developing a compact in-plane MTJ based STT-RAM device that uses modified DRAM processes at 54nm.