A European Commission semiconductor technology committee has awarded $11.6m to UKbased Anamartic Ltd, Siemens AG and Bull SA, for the development of waferscale technology (CI No 1,488). The award will be spread over four years and is part of the Commission’s efforts to support European companies in the development of leading edge technologies. Each company will receive its share of the funding from its own government and the companies are required to underwrite half the cost of the project themselves. Anamartic, which owns the rights to the basic technology for the project, is 13%-owned by Fujitsu Ltd and 19% by Tandem Computers Inc. Fujitsu also makes the wafers for Anamartic’s Wafer Stack solid state storage subsystem the first product to be based on wafer-scale technology. However, a spokeswoman for Anamartic said that there will be no technology transfer from either of those two investors and that Fujitsu has no problem with the situation. The project will be kept entirely separate from Anamartic’s commercial interests. Waferscale technology refers to the use of an entire semiconductor wafer as the basic unit of the supercomponent, rather than chips cut from the wafer. The supercomponents will be used in a variety of intermediate storage devices and the three companies will concentrate on developing 4M-bit and 16M-bit dynamic hard storage memory systems.
