Apple Buying Anobit as it Builds IP Portfolio
By Mark LaPedus, SemiMD senior editor
Like most OEMs, Apple Inc. over the years procured its chips from outside sources.
But more recently, Apple has become a major designer of chips for its own products, namely the iPad and iPhone. The company designs the ARM-based processors for these products.
For that reason, Apple continues to beef up its chip intellectual property (IP) portfolio. To gain expertise in semiconductor IP and design, Apple has acquired various chip makers in recent times. In 2008, Apple acquired PA Semi, a supplier of microcontrollers, as a means to gain low-power expertise. Then, last year, it bought processor IP house Intrinsity for similar reasons.
Now, Apple is reportedly buying Anobit Technologies Ltd. of Israel for up to $500 million, according to numerous reports over the last week. A spokesman for Anobit declined to comment.
Anobit provides flash storage solutions for the enterprise and mobile markets. It’s MSP (Memory Signal Processing) technology improves the endurance, performance and cost of flash storage products and systems.
Recently, Anobit announced a new high-performance, ultra-low power embedded flash controller for smartphones and tablet computers. Supporting up to 256GB of NAND flash, the MSP2025 delivers 666 MB/sec data transfer rate. Utilizing Anobit’s MSP technology, the MSP2025 is the first embedded flash controller to support 20nm and sub-20nm NAND flash.
Why is Apple interested in Anobit? “Flash signal processing and advanced ECC will be necessary as NAND flash memory scales to 2xnm and below. By incorporating Anobit’s Memory Signal Processing technology, Apple will be able to extend the endurance of NAND flash devices, enabling them for high performance embedded applications,” said Greg Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights.
Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective-Analysis, said Apple wants to “prevent other companies from having access to the technology. Apple may believe that it can get more value out of lower-cost flash than their competitors can if they have this technology.”
Apple is gaining chip expertise for other reasons: It wants more IP. “In the SoC era, system performance and development costs are not dominated by cost per gate (Moore’s Law) but rather chip design and software,” said Gus Richard, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co., in a report, which was obtained by SemiMD.
“As an example, there is nothing leading edge about Apple’s A5 processor. However, the performance of an iPad is perceived by end users as better than a PC. This is because the product has a longer battery life, instant on and a fast internet connection,” Richard said.
“The A5 processor is not faster than an Intel processor, but instead it has a large number of IP blocks that execute functions with lower power and typically more quickly than a general purpose CPU. We believe that the CPU is only a portion of the SoC and has become less relevant,” he said. “This coupled with the fact that Apple’s software is written to work with one set of hardware resources significantly reduces software development cost as compared to Windows that needs to run on an infinite combination of hardware resources.”
For some time, Apple has developed its own ARM-based processors for the iPad and iPhone. The devices have been manufactured on a foundry basis by Samsung, including the current A5 processor. As reported, Apple will exclusively use Samsung as its foundry for the next-generation A6 processor — and not Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) — as previously expected.
