The Startups of Nazareth

In the northern Israel city of Nazareth, around the corner from the Basilica of the Annunciation and its crowds of Christian pilgrims, is a centuries-old building, formerly a roadside inn. The stables off the courtyard where pack animals once bedded down are empty, and the rooms above, where traveling merchants used to sleep, are offices. When the windows are open, the amplified voice of the imam at a nearby mosque cuts through at prayer time. On a Friday morning in October, Jamil Mazzawi, the founder of Optima Design Automation, sits in one of the cheaply furnished, fluorescent-lit workspaces, explaining what his startup does. He gives the 15-second pitch he has perfected for investors: “The chip companies are spending billions of dollars to protect their chips from ‘soft errors.’ These are errors caused by particles coming from space, mostly from the sun, which disrupt the operation of electronic chips. We at Optima are providing a solution for chip companies to solve this problem at very low cost,” he says, then asks: “How many seconds?”

A few hundred yards from the spot where Catholics believe the angel Gabriel appeared to tell Mary of her divine pregnancy, Mazzawi worries about a different kind of heavenly visitor: the protons and alpha particles bombarding us from distant stars. The relentless shrinking of computer chips has created circuits tiny enough that the impact of a projectile a millionth of a nanometer across can cause a temporary malfunction.