THE FMS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
The Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest individual honor bestowed by FMS. It recognizes extraordinary individuals who have dedicated their careers to advancing the memory and storage industry. This award celebrates those whose leadership and technical contributions have fundamentally shaped the development, adoption, and evolution of the technologies that power our modern digital world.
FMS Lifetime Achievement Award
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:
- Founding a leading memory or storage company
- Driving the adoption of initiatives and/or standards in the memory and storage industries
- Bringing memory or storage to a new application, including supplanting older technologies
- Demonstrating exceptional leadership, including defining new architectures
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
Roll of Honour
Past Winners of the FMS Lifetime Achievement Award
Led several initiatives that established key industry standards and organizations to the benefit of memory and storage, as well as all of computing.
For creating the first NAND-type 3D Flash Memory.
For her work in defining and driving important industry standards, including ONFI, NVMe, and form factors, which were quickly adopted throughout the industry
For each playing an important role in bringing Multi-Level Cell (MLC) to the flash memory industry.
For proposing the use of a Charge Trap (CT) as a cost-effective memory device in 1967. Dr. Szedon passed on in 2025.
For co-founding SanDisk, advancing the architecture that enabled the industry and marketplace for flash memory, and leadership of Micron Technology, Inc.
For their early work with both NOR and NAND flash at M-Systems, and driving these into SSDs, USB flash drives, and cell phone handsets.
For his entrepreneurship in co-founding SEEQ and Atmel, and for his earlier inventions in chip design for EPROM, EEPROM and flash at Intel.
For driving the development and business efforts to bring Samsung to undisputed leadership of the NAND flash business.
For architecting "System-Flash" in 1989, enabling flash-based devices to be plug-compatible replacements for disk drives. Bob Norman passed on in 2021.
For co-inventing the floating gate in 1967. This was the basis of Intel's EPROM, and later the EEPROM and Flash. Dr. Sze passed on in 2023.
For the conception of flash memory in 1984, allowing erasure of an entire memory chip in a single operation—or in a "flash."
For founding SanDisk and spearheading flash memory as a data storage medium for photographs and sound recordings.
Dr. Richard Pashley, Dr. Stefan Lai, Bruce McCormick, and Niles Kynett, for bringing to market ETOX NOR in 1988.