Cavendish Kinetics has won $15.5m in second round funding, adding investors from the US and Germany. Its first $6.5m funding came as long ago as 2001.

The Dutch firm said it will use the cash to fund development of its Nanomech technology, which uses micromachined silicon to form non-volatile memory structures. The technology is compatible with CMOS.

Dr Mike Beunder, chief executive at Cavendish Kinetics, said: "There are growing demands in automotive, microcontroller and analogue/mixed-signal applications, for an ultra-low power and very robust form of CMOS compatible embedded non-volatile memory. Our embedded flash technology is perfectly positioned to fill these demands."


Leading the latest round of funding is Tallwood Venture Capital from Palo Alto: "As this is the first IP company that Tallwood has invested in, we were cautious," stated Luis Arzubi of Tallwood Venture Capital, who joins the Cavendish board.

"We came to the conclusion that Cavendish Kinetics has extraordinary technology and is poised to become a leading company in the embedded NVM space," Arzubi added.

Munich-based Wellington Partners also joined the funding round, and its director Bart Markus also joins the Cavendish board.

"The market opportunity in the embedded NVM space is exceptional," said Markus. "The superior characteristics of Cavendish's technology along with the excellent team told us that Cavendish would be a leader in this field."

Cavendish Kinetics was formed as a spin-off from Cambridge University over ten years ago.

Its Nanomech technology is implemented in the metal layers of the CMOS process, without affecting the underlying transistors and being unaffected by the size of process technology.

Being mechanical, the memory is also rad-hard, claims the firm, but does not require high programming voltages. The company claims write-erase endurance of more than 20 million cycles.