This company develops FLASH technology, is 100% employee owned and was founded in 1990 as a technology development house. Nexcom made a profitable business of technology development and started to make the transition to fabless semiconductor manufacturer in 1994. It announced its first product, a 8Mbit serial FLASH memory in Dec., 1995 and has plans for 1Mbit to 16Mbit devices.

Nexcom's FLASH technology is ideal for low-power mobile data storage applications. It is a high density technology, can be programmed at <3V, uses small sector sizes, has fast erase/program times and low power erase/program. This is accomplished via their low-power single transistor cell FN-tunneling technology. The technology is ideal for power sensitive mobile applications such as pagers, digital cameras, voice recorders, hand-held terminals, PDAs, etc. Today Nexcom makes the 8Mbit device and PCMCIA cards, however it just announced several new products. Serial FLASH devices are ideal for data storage, not code storage, but the fundamental technology is applicable to data storage as well, the interface simply has to be changed to parallel.

The new products are the NX25F040 and NX25F080 4Mbit and 8Mbit Serial Flash memories. Data transfer rates are up to 20MHz. Program times typically 2.5ms/sector. The devices feature a 536 byte serial SRAM for offloading RAM limited microcontrollers, double buffered sector writes, transfer or compare sector to SRAM commands, write protection, DOS compatible sector sizes, auto-erase before write, and a user-selected internal oscillator frequency to minimize noise in wireless applications.

Oki is a strategic partner involving product development, second sourcing, licensing and fabrication. UMC is also a foundry partner. Currently the US rep. network is 80-90% complete. The international rep. and distribution network will be finalized over the next six months. Robin is looking for representatives that have experience in or currently represent serial EE (lower density), microcontroller or linear (for mobile applications) companies.

Robin Jigour - VP of Mktg. & Sales