Report: Apple in talks to buy flash memory firm

By Peter Clarke, EE Times -- EDN, December 13, 2011

LONDON  -- Apple is in talks to buy startup Anobit Technologies Ltd at a price of between $400 million and $500 million, according to a report in a Hebrew publication called Calcalist.

Anobit (Herzeliya, Israel) has developed NAND flash controller technology that can improve the apparent endurance -- the number of reads and writes flash memory can perform. The raw endurance performance of flash memory reduces dramatically with reduction in the geometry of the manufacturing process technology, to the point where flash memory becomes unsuitable for many applications.

Anobit was founded in 2006 to make solid-state drives. It's MSP (Memory Signal Processing) technology is a combination of error correction and memory management schemes that compensates for errors and evens out wear thereby allowing higher apparent performance.

Low endurance can result in the need to install additional memory to provide endurance headroom. Anobit began production of its MSP2020 NAND flash memory controller in cooperation with Hynix Semiconductor Inc earlier in 2011. Chips from Anobit are already incorporated in a number of Apple products, including the iPhone, the iPad, and the MacBook air, the report said.

Anobit is examining a large financing round with a leading Asian flash memory manufacturer, the report said, and the talks with Apple may end up with both companies becoming strategic investors in Anobit, the report said.

Anobit is believed to have received more than $72 million from venture capital firms including Pitango, Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, and Micron Technologies. The company has about 200 people on staff.

In August Anobit announced that it had shipped more than 20 million flash controllers and that its MSP2025 supported up to 256-Gbyte of NAND flash implemented on 20-nm and sub-20-nm process technology.

Prior to co-founding Anobit, Professor Ehud Weinstein was a co-founder, chairman and CEO of Libit Signal Processing, which was acquired by Texas Instruments in 1999. Ariel Maislos is a fellow co-founder of Anobit prior to which he was co-founder and president of Passave, which was acquired by PMC Sierra in 2006. CTO Avraham Meir was previously vice president of corporate engineering at SanDisk and the CTO at M-Systems until it was acquired by SanDisk.

Anobit entered the Silicon 60, EE Times' list of emerging startup companies at version 12.0 in 2011. The latest edition of the Silicon 60, version 12.5, offers detailed technology and employment data. It can be accessed here.

This story was originally posted by EE Times.