
Dell’s venture arm is backer of carbon nanotube RAM pioneer
Dell Ventures has been a stealthy but large-scale backer of computer-related startups for several years investing at a rate of about $100 million per year. It has recently gone public on its activities revealing that it has seen about 27 exits out of 70-plus investments.
However, the level of Dell’s investment in the somewhat mature Nantero has not been disclosed. Nantero, which plans to operate an IP licensing business model, has been working on the technology since 2001 and has previously claimed to have more than a dozen partners and customers. Two known licensees are fabless chip company Fujitsu Semiconductor and foundry Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor (see Fujitsu is licensee of Nantero’s carbon-nanotube RAM).
The memory is reported to offer switching speeds of the order of 20 picoseconds at low energy together with a write speed of 5ns with endurance of the order of 10^11 cycles. This holds out the prospect that CNT-based NRAM could be superior to competitor technologies such as ReRAM and phase-change memory.
www.nantero.com
Dell Technologies Capital
Related articles:
Nantero takes funding above $110 million
Dell revealed as Graphcore backer
Fujitsu is licensee of Nantero’s carbon-nanotube RAM
