Paper Title: Innovation, Determination and the First Days of Flash

Paper Abstract: This talk will be given by Dov Moran, one of the recipients of this year's Flash Memory Summit Lifetime Achievement Award. This will be a light-hearted talk about the early days of flash memory, and how forming M-Systems in Israel early in 1989 led to many inventions and products that had a huge impact on the nonvolatile memory industry Although Dov and his partner Aryeh Mergi were already creating early SSDs based on EEPROMs and battery-backed SRAM, the inspiration to form the company came from Intel's announcement of its first NOR flash memory chips in late 1988. The story continues with the TrueFFS Flash File System, which was adopted by the PCMCIA PC Card committee as its Flash Translation Layer software. In 1993, the DiskOnChip device was created for use as an embedded SSD, and this product was successful for over 10 years - first as a NOR-based device, and then as a NAND-based device. In 1998, the concept of a USB-based flash device was born as DiskOnKey, and this led to a USB Flash Device that was co-announced with IBM at COMDEX in 2000. A mobile version of the DiskOnChip was developed, and Nokia shipped the first embedded SSD for a cellphone based on this device in 2002, Many other cellphone companies ended up using the device as well, and NAND-based SSDs have been an essential feature of cellphones since that time. A 4-year design effort led to M-Systems' introduction of a 4 bit/cell Flash device in 2006, and this product received the Most Innovative Flash Product award at the first Flash Memory Summit in 2006. SanDisk acquired the company later that year, and its Israeli R&D center continues as part of Western Digital (which bought SanDisk in 2016). The interesting stories behind this company's history will make for an enjoyable presentation.

Paper Author: Dov Moran, Managing Partner, Grove Ventures

Author Bio: Dov Moran is Managing Partner at Grove Ventures, a leading Israeli VC firm. He is one of Israel's most prominent high-tech leaders, entrepreneurs. and investors. Dov was a founder and CEO of M-Systems in 1989, which was a pioneer of several flash memory technologies including the first embedded flash for cell phones (under contract to Nokia), the Flash File System that was incorporated into the PCMCIA standard, and the USB flash drive. Under Dov's leadership, M-Systems grew to nearly $1B in annual revenue when it was acquired by SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6B. Dov earned a BSEE degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, where he also later received an Honorary Doctorate. His awards include the prestigious Eduard Rhein Award in 2012 "for the invention of a standardized portable data storage stick," and the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award in 2015 "for pioneering contributions to storage systems based on flash memory."