Let It Wave acquired by Zoran Corporation for $27.6m

Let It Wave acquired by Zoran Corporation (Nasdaq: ZRAN) for $27.6m

Transaction led by Clipperton Finance, acting as Manager.

Paris (France) – June 12, 2008
Zoran Corporation (merged with UK-based CSR in 2011) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Let It Wave SA a fabless semiconductor company based in Paris, France. Let It Wave delivers award winning and patent-pending technology for video frame rate Conversion and image enhancement capabilities for flat panel televisions and other consumer electronics products.

Zoran Corporation today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Let It Wave, a fabless semiconductor company based in Paris, France. Let It Wave delivers award winning and patent-pending technology for video Frame Rate Conversion and image enhancement capabilities for flat panel televisions and other consumer electronics products. The need to reduce motion blur on LCD TVs has driven the introduction of 120Hz panels and the development of Motion Compensated Frame Rate Conversion (“MCFRC”) solutions. In addition, studio movie content, including Blu Ray content, uses 24 images per second which requires conversion to 60 or 120Hz for best viewing quality. Let It Wave’s unique and proprietary MCFRC technology is designed to produce sharper images and reduce judder by creating additional frames using its superior Bandlet technologies. With its multi-scale geometrical processing, the solution robustly determines the direction of motion regularity, overcoming the limitations of traditional block-search algorithms. By acquiring Let It Wave, Zoran intends to deliver high performance image processing that enables artifact-free true-MCFRC for flat panel televisions as well as other video consumer electronics products.

Let It Wave was founded in 2001 by Professor Stephane Mallat, Dr. Christophe Bernard, Dr. Jérôme Kalifa, and Professor Erwan Le Pennec to develop improved image-processing capabilities for video products based on Bandlet technology at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In 2002, the company won the first national prize for innovation awarded by the French ministry of Research and Technology and also won the prestigious 2005 European Information Science Technology Grand Prize, a competition involving entrants from 29 European countries. Let It Wave was financed primarily by Iris Capital, a pan-European fund, and I-Source, France.

Under the terms of the agreement, Zoran acquired Let It Wave in an all-cash transaction valued at up to $27.6 million, which includes earnout provisions.
For more information, please contact:

Clipperton Finance

Stéphane Valorge, Partner, svalorge@clipperton.net
Nicolas von Bülow, Partner, nvonbulow@clipperton.net

About Clipperton Finance

Clipperton Finance is a European corporate finance boutique dedicated to the High Tech and Media industries. Clipperton is focused on start-up and advanced companies in the Internet/Software, Telecom, Components, CleanTech and Biotech spaces, advising them in their financial transactions: fundraising/capital increases and Mergers & Acquisitions. Over the past years the company and its team have managed to structure numerous high level international transactions in the European High Tech sector.