FMS Lifetime Achievement Award Winners for 2022

Flash Memory Summit 2022 (FMS) announced this year’s recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The 3 recipients are: Yoshishige Kitamura, formerly of NEC Corporation; Dr. Eli Harari, founder, SanDisk Technologies LLC; and Greg Atwood, formerly of Intel Corporation, Numonyx B.V., and Micron Technology, Inc.

All 3 played an important role in bringing MLC to the flash memory industry. FMS will honor these individuals for their accomplishments during the annual summit taking place August 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

MLC initially doubled the capacity of flash memory chips by storing 2 bits in each data cell. While the first MLC, with its 2 bits per cell, was productized in 1996, the technology has matured and become a fundamental aspect of nearly all flash memory shipped throughout the world. This maturation includes the now-commonplace TLC products supporting 3 bits per cell, as well as QLC products supporting 4 bits per cell. There is currently a WW effort to enable Penta-Level Cell (PLC) products which would support 5 bits per cell.

In 1985, Kitamura invented the concept of storing multiple bits in an EPROM’s floating gate cell. He did this while at NEC, the Japanese corporation that at that time was the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer as well as the world’s leading supplier of DRAM and floating gate EPROM devices.

Harari’s initial goal with his founding of SanDisk in 1988 was to produce MLC flash memory chips. After 8 years of diligent effort, the company succeeded when it first shipped CompactFlash memory cards based on MLC-capable flash chips. (Harari is a past recipient of this FMS award for other accomplishments.)

Atwood was the key person at Intel responsible for putting MLC flash into volume production with its StrataFlash products. He was inspired to initiate this effort when he learned of a telephone answering machine that stored linear values for voice recordings on EEPROM chips.

FMS also announces that it presented its 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. John R. Szedon for having proposed the use of a Charge Trap as a nonvolatile memory bit. Due to the pandemic, there was no awards ceremony during that year. Szedon’s work was detailed in a paper he delivered at the 1967 IEEE Device Research Conference. The importance of his work is demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of the flash memory sold uses the Charge Trap technique.