Lifetime Achievement Award
2024 Lifetime Achievement Award co-recipient Ryota Katsumata (holding award) on behalf of his team, with (from left) FMS Lifetime Achievement Award committee members Chuck Sobey, Brian Berg, and Jim Handy
The FMS Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting the development and use of memory, storage, and/or associated or related technologies, including one or more of the following:
- Creating or promoting an important memory or storage technology, or a related technology,
- Leadership of a major memory or storage company, business effort, or academic program,
- Bringing memory or storage technology to a new and important application
The Lifetime Achievement Award may be presented to a single person, or a small team or group of individuals with an important connection. By bestowing this award, FMS hopes to help foster further advances in the memory and storage industries.
You are invited to submit a nomination for the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award using this form.
2024 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
Hideaki Aochi, Ryota Katsumata, Masaru Kito, Masaru Kido, and Hiroyasu Tanaka, for creating the first NAND-type 3D Flash Memory.
2023 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Amber Huffman, for her work in defining and driving important industry standards, including ONFI, NVMe, and form factors, which were quickly adopted throughout the industry.
2022 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
Yoshishige Kitamura, Eli Harari, and Greg Atwood, for each playing an important role in bringing Multi-Level Cell, or MLC, to the flash memory industry.
2020 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
John R. Szedon, for proposing the use of a Charge Trap as a cost-effective memory device.
2019 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Sanjay Mehrotra, for co-founding SanDisk, advancing the architecture that enabled the industry and marketplace for flash memory, and leadership of Micron Technology, Inc. and the Semiconductor Industry Association.
2018 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
Dov Moran and Aryeh Mergi, for their early work with both NOR and NAND flash at their M-Systems startup, and driving these into several important applications including SSDs, PCs, USB flash drives, cell phone handsets, embedded systems, and flash file systems.
2017 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
George Perlegos, for his entrepreneurship with co-founding two companies which both had an early and important impact on the NVM market (SEEQ and Atmel), and for his earlier inventions in chip design and fabrication for EPROM, EEPROM and flash at Intel.
2016 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Dr. Kinam Kim, for driving the development and business efforts to bring Samsung to undisputed leadership of the NAND flash business, along with his inventions in planar and 3D NAND, and in high density storage.
2015 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Robert "Bob" Norman, for his role in architecting "System-Flash" in 1989. System-Flash uses a processor and firmware to manage the flash cells using metadata located next to user data in the flash device, to effect the Flash Translation Layer by way of wear leveling, error correction, and low-stress write/erase so that flash-based devices can be plug-compatible replacements for disk drives. Bob passed on in early 2021.
2014 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Dr. Simon Sze, for co-inventing the floating gate in 1967. Working at Bell Labs, Drs. Sze and Dawon Kahng invented a silicon device that insulated a charge which could represent a non-volatile memory bit. This was the basis of Intel's EPROM, and later the EEPROM and the Flash EEPROM.
2013 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Dr. Fujio Masuoka, for the conception of flash memory in 1984. Flash Memory was a new type of EEPROM device which required only a single transistor to store data, and whose name was based on an architecture which allowed erasure of an entire memory chip in a single operation - or in a "flash."
2012 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Dr. Eli Harari, for founding SanDisk, and for its spearheading of flash memory as a data storage medium to retain photographs, sound recordings, and other data; and for his earlier discoveries of thin silicon dioxide's importance for a practical and reliable floating gate in both the EEPROM and flash memory.
2011 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
Intel's Flash Memory Team (Dr. Richard Pashley, Dr. Stefan Lai, Bruce McCormick, and Niles Kynett), for bringing to market ETOX NOR in 1988. This was the first successful flash memory product, and its later generations became a multi-billion dollar business in the 1990s. Bruce McCormick passed on in 2014.