Avalanche Technology raises $33 million in a new funding round

pMTJ STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced that it closed its latest funding round led by Thomvest Ventures, having raised $33 million.

Avalanche currently brands its MRAM chips as P-SRAM (persistent SRAM) devices. The new funds will enable the company to develop higher-density P-SRAM devices. In addition, Avalanche says it will develop the higher densities of "persistent DRAM" required for the next generation of machine learning architectures.

In February 2016 Avalanche Technology raised $23 million and entered into a manufacturing agreement with Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (SSMC) for volume production of its STT-MRAM on 300 mm wafers. In August 2018 Avalanche announced that it has entered into a joint development and production agreement with Taiwan's UMC foundry. Under the agreement, UMC will provide embedded non-volatile STT-MRAM blocks based on its 28nm CMOS manufacturing process.

Avalanche started to sample 32Mb and 64Mb STT-MRAM chips in 2015, and started production in early 2017. In November 2018 Avalanche announced its 2nd-generation serial non-volatile discrete MRAM memory family, the SPnvSRAM which offers 1 Mb to 32 Mb densities at extended-temperature industrial-grade specifications.