Novafora is not the company you hear a lot about. Yet, this company announced today that the acquisition of Transmeta has been completed. The company that started its life as a “software CPU developed with Linus Torvalds” is now completing its journey from a VC-backed venture, successful IPO, failed product, lingering between lawsuits and finally, selling its IP until the finances finally ran out.
On the other hand, Novafora is a company headed by Shlomo and Zaki Rakib, successful engineer and enterpreneur who worked together at Terayon Communication Systems. Their vision is to create products to video content processing for the Internet era. With this acquisition, there is little doubt that companies such as Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, Philips, Nvidia and others are getting some competition.
Only time will tell how Novafora will pan out, but there is some serious engineering talent in Israel, and being backed by funds that have over 1.3 billion USD just might result in a new star on system-on-chip market.
Last great architecture to come from Israel was no other than Intel Core architecture, also known as “Chip that saved Intel’s bacon”.
