2009 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal for Sandisk CEO

The award recognizes Harari’s innovation of flash memory technology, contribution to the proliferation of flash memory devices, and visionary leadership within the semiconductor industry.

Dr. Harari, along with his colleagues Sanjay Mehrotra, president and COO, and Jack Yuan, founded SanDisk in 1988. Their vision was to create a revolutionary, low cost storage technology based on new flash semiconductor memory that would replace film, magnetic tape and rotating magnetic disk drives and enable new large consumer markets. SanDisk has achieved its founders’ vision and it has grown into the global leader in flash memory cards, with total revenues in excess of $3.35 billion in 2008, selling consumer flash memory products at more than 240,000 retail outlets worldwide.

“This award is a wonderful recognition of the breakthroughs achieved by SanDisk in the past 21 years,” said Eli Harari, chairman and CEO, SanDisk. “I have been fortunate to work with a supremely capable team, dedicated to transforming our bold vision into reality. Today hundreds of millions of people worldwide entrust their memories to SanDisk, and the entire SanDisk team has a share in this great honor. For me personally this award carries particular meaning, coming on the 50th anniversary of Bob Noyce’s co-inventing the integrated circuit, an invention that profoundly changed the course of history.”

Under Harari’s leadership, SanDisk invented flash mass storage cards and pioneered USB flash drives, developed the CompactFlash flash memory card format and co-developed the SD, microSD, Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo card formats. Harari was instrumental in the transition from NOR-based flash memory to NAND-based flash memory as well as the invention and development of multilevel cell data storage. When combined with state-of-the-art semiconductor processes executed at the leading edge, these technologies resulted in the densest, lowest-cost-per-bit, nonvolatile solid-state memory possible.