NEWS & TECHNOLOGY PROCESSES
Rigetti quantum computing company raises $71 million
QBy Peter Clarke uantum computing company Rigetti & Co Inc. (Berkeley,
Calif.) has raised $71 million in equity finance, according
to a filing with the Securities
Exchange Commission.
This brings the amount invested in
the company, which was founded in
2013, to more than $190 million. However,
it lags behind younger California
rival PsiQuantum Corp. which recently
announced it had raised $230 million.
The filing by Rigetti, dated February
28, 2020, states that the company has
sold just over $71 million, with an additional
$12.8 million of equity still available.
It does not disclose who bought the stock in the company.
In March 2017 Rigetti announced it had raised $64 million in
Series A and Series B rounds of financing. The Series A round
of $24 million was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The $40 million
Series B was led by Vy Capital
and included Andreessen Horowitz.
Investors in both rounds include Y
Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Data
Collective, FF Science, AME Cloud
Ventures, Morado Ventures, and
WTI. Institutional investors in Series
A include Sutter Hill Ventures, Susa
Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Lux
Capital, and Bloomberg Beta.
Rigetti raised a further $50 million
in a Series C round of finance in
November 2017 that includes Streamlined Ventures and Seabed
VC, according to reports.
Lossy Everspin takes MRAM partnership down to 12nm
LBy Peter Clarke oss-making MRAM pioneer Everspin Technologies Inc.
(Chandler, Ariz.) and its foundry
partner Globalfoundries Inc. (Santa
Clara, Calif.) have extended their joint development
agreement to 12nm for both
embedded and discrete MRAM.
The two companies have developed
a number of variously optimized MRAMs
at the 40nm, 28nm and 22nm nodes
including the production of a DDR4 1Gbit
MRAM. The companies have now updated
their agreement to include a 12nm
FinFET spin-torque-transfer MRAM on its 22FDX platform.
Everspin has shipped over 125 million units of discrete
MRAM products to date and has over 1000 customers. Globalfoundries
is leading in embedded MRAM development and aims
to displace embedded flash memory,
particularly in microcontroller applications
and wireless connected IoT.
For the full year of 2019 Everspin
made net loss of $14.7 million on total
revenue of $37.5 million. The total revenue
was down from $49.4 million in
2018, a drop of 24 percent. Both products
sales and licensing were down.
“Further scaling to Globalfoundries’
12nm FinFET platform will continue to
solidify not only our mutual technology leadership but will provide
the next step for STT-MRAM as the future of memory technology,”
said Kevin Conley, CEO of Everspin, in a statement.
Hybrid perovskite yields ultrafast broadband NIR imaging photodetector
A By Julien Happich team of Chinese researchers has demonstrated a
solution-processed broadband photodetector capable of
an ultrafast response speed of 5.6ns in the near infrared
region over a 1000nm spectra.
The solution-processed broadband photodetector described
in the journal Light: Science & Applications under the paper
title „Ultrafast and broadband photodetectors
based on a perovskite/organic bulk heterojunction
for large-dynamic-range imaging“ is based
on organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite and organic
bulk heterojunction (BHJ). It boasts a high
external quantum efficiency of approximately
54% at 850nm in the NIR region and a wide
linear dynamic range of 191 dB.
To further verify the broadband detection capability
and large linear dynamic range (LDR) of
the new sensor stack, the researchers adopted
the organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite (OIHP)
/BHJ photodetectors to construct a single-pixel scanning optical
imaging system, demonstrating the high-quality imaging of
complex letter graphics and visible/NIR imaging of a heat coil.
Such solution-processed organic-inorganic hybrid
perovskites photodetectors could possibly be manufactured at
low-cost, suitable for many fields of applications.
OIHP photodetectors for Visible and NIR (with
an 830-nm long-pass filter) imaging, as well as
imaging of SITP (an abbreviation of Shanghai
Institute of Technology and Physics) letter
graphics under LED illumination. The white and
blue lines in the figure represent the normalized
photocurrent signal intensity. Credit: by
Chenglong Li, Hailu Wang, Fang Wang, Tengfei
Li, Mengjian Xu, Hao Wang, Zhen Wang, Xiaowei
Zhan, Weida Hu, Liang Shen.
22 News April 2020 @eeNewsEurope www.eenewseurope.com
/eenewseurope
/www.eenewseurope.com
