A couple of weeks ago we reported that Crocus have successfully developed their 2nd generation MRAM products. It was rumored that Crocus will produce these chips in Russia, and today RusNano confirmed the story. The Russian state-owned investment group will invest $64 million to build an MRAM chip fab in Russia and further $55m will be invested in Crocus, which will control 51% of the joint venture (called Crocus Nano Electronics). They will begin mass producing MRAM chips in 2013.

Crocus announced that they have successfully developed their 2nd generation MRAM products, using SVTC Technologies production ready tools, metrology and infrastructure. Crocus said that they transferred the process to a production foundry.

Crocus says that their MRAM technology can be scalable to 90nm, 65nm and smaller, and offers high speed, reliability, and reduced power consumption.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Grandis with a $8.6 million 2nd phase project for STT-RAM chip development. The first phase ($6.0) was received in October 2008.

Phase 2 will focus on test of verification of STT-RAM integrated memory arrays.

Crocus announced an 8 million euro investment, and a change of CEO. The new CEO is Dr. Bertrand F. Cambou. His main task is to bring their MRAM products to the market. Crocus aims to complete the production transfer of its 130nm MRAM technology to manufacturing partner Tower Semiconductor soon.

Crocus has originally planned to start production towards the end of 2009.

France has launched a large Spintronics project, with a 4.2M euro investment. It's called SPIN, and involved 11 partners. One of the project goals is magnetic FPGAs. Here's how they describe it:

The objective will be to design a magnetic FPGA which will incorporate finely distributed Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJs) for non volatile storage and configuration purposes above of a CMOS core circuit. In complement of existing high density FPGAs, it will provide better versatility with intrinsic reconfigurability, instant on/off and energy saving. Such FPGAs can be used as general purpose standalone products. In the SPIN project, the FPGA will be targeted to provide intelligent processing of the magnetometers and sensors developed in objectives 2 and 3. 

More information can be found here.

The Korean Government has decided to fund STT-RAM research for Hynix and Samsung in a $40 million project. The government will pay around half of the sum for the project, which is intended to run till 2014. The project calls for the government to work with Samsung and Hynix together for research and development on STT-MRAM chips. Korea aims to control around 45% of the 30-nano type memory chip market by 2015.

The companies have already opened a new laboratory at Hangyang University's fusion technology center. It is already equipped with a fully operational 300mm magnetic thin film deposition system and other chip-making facilities.

Spingate is a new US-based fabless company focusing on development, licensing and manufacturing of solid state memory, specifically, perpendicular MRAM.

We have talked to Dr. Alex Shukh, Spingate's co-founder, CTO and CEO. Alex explains that they have decided to focus on perpendicular MRAM because according to their estimates it does not suffer from several fundamental issues of its longitudinal (in-plane) analogue.

However, to be successful with p-MRAM development, Spingate needs to solve several serious problems, such as, a reduction of energy consumption during writing, development of new magnetic materials with perpendicular anisotropy for storage and reference layers exhibiting high GMR, etc.

Spingate's IP portfolio already includes one granted and several pending patents on p-MRAM, which covers multi-bit cell, 3D-memory designs, etc. The proposed solutions should close existing cell density gap between MRAM and Flash since 2D-Flash won't be able to compete with 3D-MRAM. Spingate are currently working on cell design development and optimization, and is looking for investors.

Micromem announced that they have raised 375K$ in a private placement.

They will use the proceeds from the offering for general working capital purposes.

NVE Corporation announced today financial results for the quarter and nine months ended December 31, 2008.  Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 23% to $5.88 million from $4.77 million in the prior-year quarter. The revenue increase was due to an 8% increase in product sales and a 150% increase in contract research and development revenue. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 increased 45% to $2.47 million.

NVE reported a strong growth in contract R&D. In the conference call, Daniel Baker (company's CEO) said - "Most of the contracts that we're working on right now are related to anti-tamper MRAM".

The company also announced today that its Board of Directors authorized the repurchase of up to $2.5 million of the company’s common stock from time to time in open market, block, or privately negotiated transactions. 

Grandis announced that it has been awarded $6.0 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the initial phase of research to develop spin-transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM) chips (for the 45 nm technology node and beyond). The total value of the effort, if all phases of the development program are completed, could be up to $14.7 million over four years.