Crocus Nano Electronics (CNE), a joint venture founded in 2011 by Russia’s state-owned nanotechnology giant Rusnano and France’s Crocus Technology, yesterday announced that it has raised $60 million from its existing investors in additional capital.
The new funding will enable CNE to “finalize construction and installation works, complete procurement and installation of all capital equipment to support factory operations; and accelerate the Crocus Generation 3 Technology transfer through the end of 2014,” the company stated.
“With this new capital, we are now fully funded to deliver the last key milestone in the implementation of Russia’s first ever 300mm fab,” said Mark Dydyk, CEO of CNE.
Last week, the full Board of Directors from CNE toured their state-of-the-art semiconductor factory in Technopolis Moscow. Launched in October last year, this semiconductor factory is the very first in Russia to use 300mm diameter wafer for MRAM (1) manufacturing.
Currently, 200mm and 300mm CMOS wafers can be deposited with magnetic layers to create memory cells. CNE is ramping up with the objective to turn out 500 wafers per week by the end of 2014.
The future products of the Russo-French project, based on MRAM and a proprietary technology called Magnetic Logic Unit, which Crocus Technology has developed in collaboration with IBM, could be used in smart cards, network switching systems, biometric identification devices, near-field communications (NFC) based communicators and in secure memory.
(1) MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory) is a next-generation memory that demonstrates improved nonvolatile properties, an increased speed of recording and reading and a virtually unlimited number of rerecording cycles.
