Nantero, the world leader in carbon nanotube electronics, announced it has closed a $31.5 million Series E financing round, which included new investors and participation from existing investors Charles River Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Globespan Capital Partners, and Harris and Harris Group. This substantially oversubscribed round highlights Nantero’s ongoing success in delivering a new generation of super-fast, ultra-high density memory called NRAM® (non-volatile random access memory) that can enable a variety of exciting new features and products in both consumer and enterprise electronics.
Nantero’s NRAM has already been installed in multiple production fabs and is currently being designed into innovative new electronic products that require increased storage, low power consumption, high speed, reliability, and high endurance. The company intends to use its new funding to continue the acceleration of NRAM as the leading next–generation memory for both storage class memory and as a replacement for flash and DRAM.
“With Nantero’s NRAM, the wait for a new generation of super-fast, high-density non-volatile memory is over,” said Greg Schmergel, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Nantero, Inc. “Our technology is already under development today in multiple world-class manufacturing facilities and we have more than a dozen major corporate partners actively working on NRAM. We are excited to begin the next phase of commercialization which will bring Nantero’s NRAM into volume production and change the course of electronics innovation for decades to come.”
Nextbigfuture interviewed Nantero CEO Greg Schmergel
* Nantero NRAM is DDR4 compatible
* two top foundries are working with them
* they have a staff of 55 people
* they want to be the ARM of computer memory (ARM successfully licensed chip designs)
* multi-gigabyte designs should be complete in mid-2016 and released as products in mid-2017
* there is 10 thousand times resistance between on andoff states. This will allow for multiple resistant state memory for higher density and lower costs
* there is the potential for carbon nanotube logic in the future
How the carbon nanotubes are used and manipulated ?
* raw carbon nanotubes are obtained from suppliers
* the carbon nanotubes are placed into a pure water solution (no chlorination)
* they are purified in water (iron and other contaminants is removed, have to get to parts per billion purity.
* package in industry bottles
* they are deposited onto chips using spin coating to get a 40 nanometer layer
* hundreds of carbon nanotube connect each pair of electrodes.
Nantero’s NRAM: The Future of Memory
The availability of a new generation of memory that is 100s of times faster than NAND, can deliver terabits of storage capacity, and consumes very little power, has the potential to change the future of electronics. Nantero’s NRAM has all of these breakthrough characteristics. Targeting both the embedded and standalone memory markets, Nantero is already licensing its NRAM IP to major chip manufacturers, foundries and electronics companies around the world.
Targeting a wide range of markets such as consumer electronics, mobile computing, wearables, Internet of Things, enterprise storage, government/military, space, and automotive, Nantero’s NRAM delivers major advantages over other memory technologies. These include:
* CMOS Compatible: Works in standard CMOS fabs with no new equipment needed
* Limitless Scalability: Designed to scale below 5nm in the future
* High-Endurance: Proven to operate for orders of magnitude more cycles than flash
* Faster Read and Write: Same as DRAM, 100s of times faster than NAND
* High Reliability: will retain memory for over 1,000 years at 85 degrees Celsius or more than 10 years at 300 degrees Celsius
* Low Power: Essentially zero in standby mode, 160x lower write energy per bit than NAND
* Low Cost: Simple structure, can be 3D multi-layer and multi-level cell (MLC)
Competing future memory
* better versions of flash and DRAM
* memristor memory (HP and others)
* high density MRAM
* STT-RAM
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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