Los Angeles - Coatue Corp., a startup that had successfully built arrays of nonvolatile memory cells in polymer technology, was folded into FASL LLC last week. Earlier in the year Coatue had been sold to Advanced Micro Devices Inc., an investor, for an undisclosed amount.

Coatue became a part of AMD's contribution of assets to FASL, a joint flash memory venture of AMD and Fujitsu Ltd., according to ITU Ventures. ITU, which announced the sale, is a financial backer of Coatue.

Coatue had claimed that its technology combined the speed of DRAM, the nonvolatility of flash and low power consumption into a single electronic memory.

An article on Coatue's Web site (www.coatue.biz/) dated June 2002 quotes Andrew Perlman, then Coatue's chief executive officer, as saying, "We have a few small prototype chips already that can store 256k of data." It continues, "Our next major milestone is to have a one-megabit chip operational by the end of the year, to start testing in devices. Then, [in] 2003, our first production chip will be in the one-gigabyte range."

Coatue said it expected the storage density and cost per bit of its products would be superior to conventional silicon memory products.

The company's technology is based on licenses with the University of California at Los Angeles and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Russia, according to its Web site.

The company counted instant-boot computers, single-chip PCs and solid-state video storage among the applications that were not possible with conventional memory chips but would be achievable with its technology.

"FASL LLC's leadership in nonvolatile memory technologies, coupled with Coatue's new class of polymer-based technologies, creates a powerful combination," said Andrew Murray, principal of ITU Ventures, in a statement.

"ITU was an early investor in Coatue and they have supported Coatue's efforts in a number of key strategic areas," said Perlman, Coatue's founder and now director of business development for FASL.

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