Ramtron Australia Ltd’s Ramtron International Corp subsidiary in Colorado Springs, Colorado has won a multimillion dollar strategic technology co-development alliance with Seiko Epson Corp, which will pay on-going royalties to Ramtron for the products it produces using Ramtron’s patented ferroelectronic technology, and will join with the Australian company in developing a high-volume manufacturing process for sub-micron ferroelectronic CMOS integrated circuits, with the partners sharing rights to the jointly developed technology, and each able to design, manufacture and market its own products using the technology; Seiko Epson will also provide Ramtron with manufacturing capacity for its own non-volatile Ferroelectronic Random Access Memory products, and get sales and distribution rights for specific of the products in Japan and Southeast Asia; being non-volatile, FRAMs retain their state when power is switched off, are claimed to be as fast as statics, and as dense as dynamics, and the technology can be applied to microprocessors, application-specific integrated circuits and many other semiconductor devices.
