Nanochip (Fremont, Calif.) said the funds raised will allow it to complete development of its first prototypes later this year to support design verification testing and limited customer sampling in 2009.

The company's CEO, Gordon Knight, said Nanochip is on track to reach commercialization of its first offerings by 2010.

The round was led by an un-named "world class investment company", with participants including previous backers Intel Capital and JK&B Capital.

Founded in 1996, Nanochip has been developing a nano-probe array based silicon storage chip that would allow tens of gigabytes of storage per chip. The company licensed phase-change non-volatile storage technology from Ovonyx Inc. in August 2004.

Nanochip said it is designing a family of removable, rewritable data storage products for use in a wide range of future consumer electronics products.

The first products are expected to exceed 100 GB per chip set, reaching terabytes (TB) in the future, and at a substantially lower cost compared with flash memory solutions.

"Flash has become the technology of choice for a variety of consumer and business applications where cost-effective, non-volatile solid-state storage is a must," said Keith Larson, vice president and director of manufacturing, memory and digital health sectors for Intel Capital.

"However, as flash process technology scaling begins to approach its limits, Nanochips technology is well positioned to provide memory capacity with exponentially higher storage densities at a cost per gigabyte significantly below that of flash technology. New memory components, such as Nanochips, will enable new, innovative electronics devices and increase the performance of existing computing and other devices," Larson added.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved