One of the more fun aspects of last week’s Flash Memory Summit was the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award. This is something that the show’s management has allowed me to do for the past four events.
This year’s award went to Dr. Simon Sze, who co-invented the floating gate transistor (the basis for all flash, EEPROM, and EPROM) at Bell Labs back in 1967.
Sze and his partner Dawon Kahng were finishing lunch in the company cafeteria with a cheesecake dessert. The two discussed what would happen if a MOSFET was built with extra layers like the layers in the cake. Their intent was to use semiconductors to replace Continue reading “Cheesecake and Floating Gates”