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Israel's Saifun chips away at the flash memory market
By Allison Kaplan Sommer November 27, 2005

According to Dr. Boaz Eitan, founder and CEO of Nasdaq's latest rising star, Israeli flash memory chip developer Saifun, even in the tightest prisons, people escape once in a while.

He ought to know. During his military service as a pilot for the Israel Defense Forces, he was shot down over Syria in 1970 and held for three years as a prisoner of war in Damascus. Though he was released by diplomatic means, this concept of escape has remained with him throughout his working career.

As he likes to tell Saifun's investors, one of the main problems of most flash memory chips used in mobile devices today, are that electrons inevitably escape, causing memory to deteriorate over time.

This is extremely significant, as consumers need to know that the information they hold on their laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players, or iPods are safe at all times, even when the power is off or the batteries unexpectedly run down.

According to Dr. Ed Mlavsky, a high tech venture capitalist, and chairman and founding partner of Gemini Israel Funds, and one of the earliest investors in Saifun, the company's unique flash technology called NROM (nitrate-read-only memory) provides a better method of imprisoning electrons.

NROM has helped transform Saifun into one of the hottest companies on Nasdaq today. While the Israeli venture capital industry has long had it on its radar screen, it's only been in the last nine months after it became clear that the company was headed to the US stock market that investors and the financial press have also been buzzing with anticipation.

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