Investment - Page 7

Spin Transfer Technologies (STT) announced that they raised $36 million in series A funding led by parent company, Allied Minds and Invesco Asset Management. STT will use the money to accelerate the development of its patented orthogonal spin transfer magneto resistive random access memory technology (OST-MRAM) - by scaling operation, hiring new employees and purchasing equipment.

This is great news for STT. The last we heard from the company was in November 2010 when they announced the successful development of the STT-MRAM device that uses STT's proprietary orthogonal spin transfer technology with a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) for memory state read-out.

There are reports that Everspin is looking for venture capital cash - as it wants to hire more people needed to expand operation. The company expects to ship over 5 million MRAM chips in 2012 to over 300 customers.

Last month Everspin announced a 300% growth in product shipment in 2011 with 250 new design wins, including Dell and LSI.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Crocus have successfully developed their 2nd generation MRAM products. It was rumored that Crocus will produce these chips in Russia, and today RusNano confirmed the story. The Russian state-owned investment group will invest $64 million to build an MRAM chip fab in Russia and further $55m will be invested in Crocus, which will control 51% of the joint venture (called Crocus Nano Electronics). They will begin mass producing MRAM chips in 2013.

Crocus announced that they have successfully developed their 2nd generation MRAM products, using SVTC Technologies production ready tools, metrology and infrastructure. Crocus said that they transferred the process to a production foundry.

Crocus says that their MRAM technology can be scalable to 90nm, 65nm and smaller, and offers high speed, reliability, and reduced power consumption.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Grandis with a $8.6 million 2nd phase project for STT-RAM chip development. The first phase ($6.0) was received in October 2008.

Phase 2 will focus on test of verification of STT-RAM integrated memory arrays.

Crocus announced an 8 million euro investment, and a change of CEO. The new CEO is Dr. Bertrand F. Cambou. His main task is to bring their MRAM products to the market. Crocus aims to complete the production transfer of its 130nm MRAM technology to manufacturing partner Tower Semiconductor soon.

Crocus has originally planned to start production towards the end of 2009.

France has launched a large Spintronics project, with a 4.2M euro investment. It's called SPIN, and involved 11 partners. One of the project goals is magnetic FPGAs. Here's how they describe it:

The objective will be to design a magnetic FPGA which will incorporate finely distributed Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJs) for non volatile storage and configuration purposes above of a CMOS core circuit. In complement of existing high density FPGAs, it will provide better versatility with intrinsic reconfigurability, instant on/off and energy saving. Such FPGAs can be used as general purpose standalone products. In the SPIN project, the FPGA will be targeted to provide intelligent processing of the magnetometers and sensors developed in objectives 2 and 3. 

More information can be found here.

The Korean Government has decided to fund STT-RAM research for Hynix and Samsung in a $40 million project. The government will pay around half of the sum for the project, which is intended to run till 2014. The project calls for the government to work with Samsung and Hynix together for research and development on STT-MRAM chips. Korea aims to control around 45% of the 30-nano type memory chip market by 2015.

The companies have already opened a new laboratory at Hangyang University's fusion technology center. It is already equipped with a fully operational 300mm magnetic thin film deposition system and other chip-making facilities.