Flash Memory Summit (FMS), to be held August 6-8 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, is pleased to announce Sanjay Mehrotra as the recipient of its 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award, “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.”
The FMS Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) recognizes individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting the development and use of flash memory and associated or related technologies. Recent recipients include M-Systems founders Dov Moran and Aryeh Mergi, and Samsung’s Dr. Kinam Kim.
Mr. Mehrotra began his career in 1980 by designing erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROMs) at Intel. This job allowed him to work with George Perlegos and to meet Eli Harari, and they became two of the great mentors of his career. (Perlegos and Harari received FMS LAAs in 2017 and 2012, respectively.) In 1988, Harari recruited Mehrotra to help start SanDisk, and to build solid-state drives (SSDs) from flash memory at a time when flash was still a fledgling laboratory technology.
In the earliest days of SanDisk, Harari, Mehrotra and 2015 LAA winner Bob Norman worked together on an SSD design that used an embedded processor to manage flash wearout. This led to a critically important patent family whose technology is now used throughout the flash industry. Mehrotra also co-authored a defining patent on multilevel cell technology, one of the more than 70 patents that include him as inventor.
At SanDisk, Mehrotra advanced through management roles, and he became chief operating officer in 2001, president in 2006, and finally chief executive officer in 2010 after Harari’s retirement. Mehrotra diversified SanDisk into enterprise markets, and eventually led the sale of the company to Western Digital in 2016. Soon after, he was recruited to take the helm at Micron Technology, a world leader in both DRAM and flash development and manufacturing. Mehrotra also serves as a leading industry voice with government policymakers as 2019 chair of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Harari said, “Sanjay’s inventiveness has had a fundamental impact on the industry, and his big heart advocates for disadvantaged young people.”
Perlegos added, “Since his start as a young engineer out of UC Berkeley, Sanjay’s persistence, handiwork and focus on results have allowed him to excel.”
Norman noted, “As he is a true flash pioneer, Sanjay is most deserving of this prestigious award. It was a privilege and honor to have worked with him.”
Mehrotra will accept his LAA award at FMS on Tuesday, August 6, at 11:30am. Further information about his background can be found at https://FlashMemorySummit.com/LAA.html.
Key FMS sessions this year cover 3D flash, RRAM, MRAM, life beyond flash, key-value store and Kubernetes, controllers, composable infrastructure, computational storage, and persistent memory. Many sessions, including ones sponsored by NVMe®, the standards-setting group, offer the latest information on NVMe, NVMe/TCP, and NVMe-oF.
FMS features the most exciting products and offers the broadest coverage of a rapidly expanding market. The 2018 event drew over 6,200 registrants and 120 exhibitors. The conference also includes annual updates, market research sessions, performance testing results, an expert table session, and a VC Forum. FMS is the industry’s premier showcase for storage technology.
