Artifact Details

Title

Masuoka, Fujio oral history

Catalog Number

102746492

Type

Document

Description

Masuoka-san was born in Takasaki, Japan in the late 1940’s. He attended Tohoku University in Sendai where he pursued studies in integrated circuits and obtained a PhD. After graduation in 1971, he joined Toshiba, where his first job was to work on a floating-gate, non-volatile memory. He later pursued research in flash memory, realizing it could provide faster operation and electrical erase. He invented the NAND-type flash memory because he felt it had the best chance vs NOR-flash to compete in price with disk drives. He envisioned that high density flash memory could be used in digital cameras, and many other electronic products. This project was done “under the table” as it was not authorized by Toshiba. As a result of this lack of support and recognition, he left Toshiba and became a university professor for over 11 years.

Date

2012-09-21

Contributor

Dennis, Eric, Videographer
Katz, Jeff, Interviewer
Masuoka, Fujio, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

28 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

semiconductor history; Toshiba Corporation; NAND Flash; NOR Flash; Tohoku University; non-volatile memory; Floating gates; erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM); flash memory

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Lot Number

X6623.2013