Simtek Corporation, headquartered in

Colorado Springs, CO Colorado Springs is a home rule municipality in, and the county seat of, El Paso County, Colorado, United States. It is the largest city in El Paso County, with a population of 478,961 at the 2020 United States Census, a 15.02% increase since ...

, was an early leader in the development of

SONOS SONOS, short for "silicon–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon", more precisely, " polycrystalline silicon"—"silicon dioxide"—" silicon nitride"—"silicon dioxide"—"silicon", is a cross sectional structure of MOSFET (metal-oxide-semicond ...

memory technology which it used in its nvSRAM product line which featured a SONOS

Flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both u ...

coupled with an SRAM shadow memory to achieve both speed and non-volatility. The company was acquired by

Cypress Semiconductor Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoC programmable system-on-chip solutions, analog and PMIC Power Management ICs, Ca ...

in September 2008. Simtek was a

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...

company that relied on wafer foundry manufacturing support from

Chartered Semiconductor Chartered Semiconductor was created in 1987, as a venture that included Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd. Yet, it was not until 2000, that ST Engineering (Singapore Technologies Semiconductors), a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holding ...

, DongBu HiTek, and Cypress.

History

Simtek Corporation was founded in 1987 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The company sold a product called the NOVRAM (nonvolatile RAM) a

Non-volatile random-access memory Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is random-access memory that retains data without applied power. This is in contrast to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM), which both maintain data only for as lon ...

that combined a shadow-RAM (SRAM) with an

EEPROM EEPROM (also called E2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as ...

. It was designed to allow the SRAM to operate (at high SRAM speeds) for most of the time, but when it received a signal (usually sent by the system when a power failure was imminent) the entire contents of the SRAM were copied into the EEPROM at a very high speed thanks to the internal parallelism of the device.

Business affairs

In March 1991 Simtek went public, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol 'SMTK". Harold A. Blomquist became CEO in 2005 replacing Douglas Mitchell who had served for seven years. The company was acquired in September 2008 by

in a deal valued at $46M. In the quarter immediately before it was acquired, Simtek posted revenues of $7.5M and a net loss of $2.7M. Cypress pledged to continue to support Simtek's product line after the acquisition. In 2008 the company re-branded as AgigA Tech Inc.

References

{{reflist Electronics companies of the United States Companies based in Colorado Springs, Colorado