$300M Investment in Crocus’ TAS-MRAM

Crocus has announced an investment of $300 million in the company and its Thermally Assisted Switching™ MRAM.  The investment comes from RUSNANO for creation of a manufacturing facility in Russia for medium- to high-density MRAM.  The two companies will form Crocus Nano Electronics (CNE) to build an advanced MRAM production facility in Russia capable of producing 90nm and 65nm material on Crocus’ TAS-MRAM technology.

Under the terms of the agreement, $125 million will be committed in the first year to set up the fab, and the existing investors of RUSNANO and Crocus will make an equity investment of $55 million into Crocus for additional technical development.  An additional $120 million will be scheduled for subsequent years for additional increases in the production capacity.  Further investments will be made at a later date in order to support future upgrades to 45nm processing.

The manufacturing flow will be designed to add MRAM-specific features within a standard 300mm CMOS process.   Initial operation is expected to begin within 2 years at 500 wafers per week, with the potential to double that capacity in a later phase of investment.  Crocus will also invest over $5 million initially into Russian research organizations in order to develop other advanced manufacturing solutions as part of the support infrastructure.

This manufacturing strategy compliments Crocus’ existing 130nm foundry partnership with TowerJazz, which is currently in the final qualification stages with production planned by the end of this year.  Processing contributions of San Jose’s Silicon Valley Technology Center (SVTC) also should be acknowledged.

Crocus’ investor RUSNANO was established through the reorganization of the corporation formerly known as the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies.   Anatoly Chubais is now serving as chairman of the Executive Board. In Autumn 2009, the supervisory council of RUSNANO approved the corporation’s participation in a new Russian venture fund established in partnership with VTB Group and well-known Silicon Valley investment company Draper Fisher Jurvetson to focus on promising nanotechnology innovation.  RUSNANO has since committed $5.9 billion to 110 projects with more than $2.4 billion already invested, and has opened an office on Sand Hill Road in San Jose.

One of the competitive elements we advise clients engaged in new memory technologies to heed in their business development practices is to avoid becoming too focused on the item-by-item comparison of their data sheets with those of their potential competitors.  Participation in emerging markets and with emerging technologies often includes another important element, which is the ability of a competitor to exert an influence on the architecture of future products beyond just the performance attributes of the data sheets.  We place this announcement by Crocus in that category of potentially game-altering events.  The commitment to a significant volume of manufacturing capacity by CNE and the presence of an influential new supporter in RUSNANO has to be acknowledged as substantially raising the ante in the development of new memory technologies.

www.convergentsemiconductors.com - Global Analysis of Memory Strategies and Issues