Computer History Museum

Masuoka, Fujio oral history

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.

Item Details

Date
2012-09-21 (Made)
Type
Document
Catalogue number
102746492
Organization
Computer History Museum (Publisher)
People
Eric Dennis (Videographer)
Fujio Masuoka (Interviewee)
Jeff Katz (Interviewer)
Category
Transcript
Extent
28 p.
Place of publication
USA/CA/Mountain View
Language
English
Acquisition number
X6623.2013
Subject
Toshiba Corporation, Semiconductor History, Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EPROM), Floating Gates, Non-Volatile Memory, Flash Memory
Archive collection
CHM Oral History collection
Archive hierarchy
Oral History collection