Nantero takes funding above $110 million
This takes the total raised by the company since its founding in 2001 above $110 million, the company said. Globespan Capital Partners and also included participation from both new and existing strategic and financial investors.
Nantero claims to have more than dozen partners and customer across the consumer electronics, computing and semiconductor industries working on its CNT-based nonvolatile random access memory (NRAM) for which it is employing a licensing business model. Nantero said the funding would enable the company to support these partners in bringing multiple products to market and to enable new customers to begin development.
The only publicly-known licensees are fabless chip company Fujitsu Semiconductor and foundry Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor (see Fujitsu is licensee of Nantero’s carbon-nanotube RAM).
Next: How it works
The nanotube memory is a layer of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in a random mesh matrix structure with hundreds of CNTs per device with many different intersection points, embedded within a conventional CMOS process. The number of CNTs that make contact and the effective resistance across the layer is dependent upon an applied voltage and can be set and reset. The resulting memory offers switching speeds of the order of 20 picoseconds at low energy together with a practical 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 and scale better in physical geometry to become a universal memory to replace both DRAM and NAND flash memory.
“This round enables Nantero to accelerate its pace in product development, especially of its multi-gigabyte DDR4-compatible memory product,” said David Poltack, managing director of Globespan Capital Partners, in a statement issued by Nantero. “Nantero has multiple industry-leading customers who would like to receive NRAM even sooner. The fact that several of these customers, as well as key partners in the ecosystem, have decided to also invest in Nantero is a strong sign of confidence given how well they know Nantero and its product from years of working together.”
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Fujitsu is licensee of Nantero’s carbon-nanotube RAM
Nanotube-based NRAMs taking over the world soon, says Nantero
IMEC and Nantero launch joint carbon nanotube memory program
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