Dr. Harari receives US highest honor

What could be more exhilarating then being awarded by United States President Barack Obama. Dr. Eli Harari, Co-founder and retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SanDisk, was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the National Science Foundation for his significant contributions towards the development proliferation of flash memory.

The award represents the nation’s highest honor for advancing science and technology by recognizing those who made lasting contributions that have created a greater understanding of the world and improved the lives of many. U.S. President Barack Obama conferred the medal at a ceremony at the White House, which was attended by leading dignitaries and other medal laureates.

Dr. Harari co-founded SanDisk more than 25 years ago with the vision of using flash memory to store data in mobile products. Flash memory – an ideal storage medium due to its small size, ruggedness and low power consumption – has since become ubiquitous in mobile devices, and is now found in digital cameras, smartphones, tablets, thin-and-light laptops and other portable products. Flash memory is also increasingly transforming datacenters, enabling them to accelerate the processing and analysis of vast and growing amounts of data, thereby helping to make social media, online media-streaming, real-time business analytics and other industries both possible and feasible.

Throughout the years, SanDisk has garnered the reputation as one of the most trusted brands for its innovations such as:

• Shipping the world’s first flash-based SSD in 1991;
• Revolutionizing the flash memory market in 1997 with multi-level cell (MLC) technology, doubling the density of each memory die to dramatically reduce cost;
• Introducing the SD™ card format in 1998 in partnership with Toshiba and Panasonic; and
• Developing the world’s smallest NAND flash chip in 2012,which can store 128 billion individual bits of information on an area the size of a U.S. penny.