On June 25th, Eli Harari, will be honored by IEEE with the 2009 Robert N. Noyce Medal. The medal will recognize Harari's innovation of flash memory technology, contribution to the proliferation of flash memory devices, and visionary leadership within the semiconductor industry.

Dr. Harari, along with his colleagues Sanjay Mehrotra, and Jack Yuan, founded SanDisk in 1988. Their vision was to create a revolutionary, low-cost storage technology based on new flash semiconductor memory that would replace film, magnetic tape, and rotating magnetic disk drives. Under Harari's leadership, SanDisk invented flash mass storage cards and pioneered USB flash drives, developed CompactFlash, SD, and microSD, and codeveloped Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo card formats. Harari was instrumental in the transition from NOR-based flash memory to NAND-based flash memory as well as the invention and development of multilevel cell data storage.

Harari holds a doctorate degree in solid state sciences from Princeton University and a bachelor's degree in physics with honors from Manchester University. In addition to inventing the floating gate EEPROM, the precursor to flash, Harari's technical resume includes more than 100 U.S. and foreign patents and numerous technical publications.

For a complete list of this year's IEEE medal recipients, visit http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/pr/2009mdlrecips.html.