FMS Lifetime Achievement Award Winner For 2023

Flash Memory Summit (FMS) announced this year’s recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award: Amber Huffman of Google Cloud.

Huffman is being recognized for her achievements in bringing flash storage into the mainstream of the storage industry by founding and driving the standards that have made flash memory a mainstream storage medium for virtually all computing applications. FMS will honor Huffman for her accomplishments during the annual summit on August 8.

She is receiving this award for her part in establishing and leading industry organizations whose standards have accelerated the adoption of NAND flash in computing systems:

• The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI), which standardized NAND chip interfaces to work with all chips, regardless of supplier or revision level
• NVMe, an alternative to HDD-oriented storage interfaces that takes advantage of flash’s particular strengths, and enables storage class memory including persistent memory
• The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), the programming interface for SATA, to enable scaling beyond HDD limitations to allow SSDs to gain market penetration
• Board member of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation, and OCP Storage Project co-lead, to drive common datacenter SSD requirements for adoption of advanced features
• Board member of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), which provides the path to integrate persistent memory into SoC packages

She has shown leadership in all of these and other standards. She also founded NVM Express, Inc., served as the spec editor until 2017, and continues to lead the organization forward as its president. Her work defined and drove a standard that, like ONFI, has proven to be transformative throughout the industry.

She is a principal engineer at Google Cloud, where she is responsible for steering Google’s industry engagement in the datacenter ecosystem including storage, servers, networking, and accelerators. Previously, she worked at Intel for over 25 years as an Intel Fellow and VP, and she has been granted 25 patents in storage architecture and related technologies.

She is known as an inclusive leader and passionate mentor, including serving on the Global Semiconductor Alliance Women’s Leadership Council and the University of Michigan’s Computer Science & Engineering National Advisory Board. Recent honors include being the inaugural recipient of Flash Memory Summit’s and Evaluator Group’s first SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award in 2018, and recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Rising Women of Influence Award in 2019.

“Amber‘s technical influence in the computing and datacenter ecosystem space cannot be overstated. Throughout her career Amber has been instrumental to driving consensus and action around new standards that moved the entire storage industry forward,” said Amin Vahdat, VP and GM, systems, and cloud AI, Google Cloud. “Not only has she impacted the technology, but she has made a lasting impact on the community as well, serving in key leadership roles along the way. I am excited to see Amber‘s achievements in this space recognized and look forward to witnessing her contributions in the years to come.“

“Amber‘s lifetime work in driving NAND flash and interface standards – and the technologies behind them – has been profoundly transformational to the industry,” said Rich Uhlig, Intel senior fellow, CVP and director, Intel Labs.  “She is an inspiration not only for what she has accomplished, but how she did it – always seeking to support and coach the technologists around her to reach new heights of innovation as a community.  It is wonderful to see her leadership recognized.“

“Amber‘s work and vision enabled flash storage to move from simply a faster, more-expensive HDD drive replacement to the dominant storage technology from the laptop to the data center,” said Chuck Sobey, FMS general chair. “We are delighted to showcase her contributions, and are looking forward to her continuing leadership in our industry.“

The FMS website includes more information about Amber Huffman’s impact on the memory and storage industry, as well as information about the Lifetime Achievement Award recipients since 2011.