According to the latest industry chatter, Apple is on the verge of coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Anobit, a flash memory company based in Israel.

The rumor, which comes directly from Middle Eastern news sources, indicates that Apple does, indeed, have designs on the Israeli outfit that specializes in flash storage. The firm, which presently has some 200 employees, could fetch as much as a half-billion dollars from Apple.

Apple's preoccupation with Anobit and its technology is believed to stem back to the company's MSP-powered MSP20xx embedded flash controllers for both smartphones and tablets. These memory performance boosters could be of great value to Apple as the iDevice line grows increasingly more sophisticated and in need of more power on all fronts.

Although the acquisition isn't yet a done deal, should it transpire, it will be the first acquisition for Apple during Tim Cook's tenure as CEO.

Source: TechCrunch