FMS: The Future of Memory and Storage Announces its 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage, recognized as the world’s foremost conference highlighting the key advancements, trends, and industry figures shaping the multi-billion-dollar high-speed memory, storage, and SSD markets, is excited to announce this year’s recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award: the team at Toshiba, now KIOXIA Corporation, that developed the world’s first 3D NAND Flash in 2007. This team’s five key members were Hideaki Aochi, Ryota Katsumata, Masaru Kito, Masaru Kido, and Hiroyasu Tanaka. FMS will honor this team when it presents the award during the morning Keynote session on Tuesday, August 6, the first day of its annual conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley.

KIOXIA’s 3D NAND technology, called BiCS FLASH™ (Bit Cost Scalable Flash), had its world introduction in 2007 at the IEEE VLSI Symposium. Since that time, Toshiba, and now KIOXIA, have developed eight generations of 3D NAND flash memory based on this architecture. BiCS FLASH™ technology changed NAND flash from horizontal scaling – which was how semiconductors were always scaled in the past, and which was hitting a limit with NAND flash – to a vertical structure that could add multiple layers in a single lithography step. This dramatic architectural change has enabled flash to continue its history of Moore’s Law scaling, and this is expected to continue for years to come. The latest BiCS FLASH™ generation 8 flash memory has scaled to 218 layers.

“A 3D architecture is essential for enabling flash memory to continue scaling to ever-greater densities.  FMS is pleased to recognize this team of five highly skilled engineers who developed the world’s first 3D NAND flash,” said Chuck Sobey, FMS General Chair. “Their innovation showed it was possible to push past then-current scaling limits, thereby accelerating innovations in storage and across computing systems overall.”

“KIOXIA is proud that the industry-changing new architecture created by our engineering team in Japan nearly 20 years ago is being recognized with this important industry award,” said Atsushi Inoue, Vice President and Technology Executive in the Memory Division at KIOXIA Corporation, Tokyo, Japan. “This 3D design has enabled flash memory to be one of the fastest-growing technologies in the history of the semiconductor industry.”

To register for FMS, visit FutureMemoryStorage.com.

About FMS: The Future of Memory and Storage

FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage, produced by Conference ConCepts, is the premier global event showcasing cutting-edge developments in multi-billion-dollar high-speed memory and storage technologies. As the world’s largest conference and exhibition in this sector, FMS highlights mainstream applications, breakthrough innovations, key enabling technologies, and the full spectrum of players—from leading vendors to disruptive startups. This event spans critical application areas including AI, enterprise data centers, high-performance computing, mobile devices at the edge, and embedded systems. FMS serves as a dynamic hub where technology professionals, executive leaders, customers, cloud providers, hyperscaler companies, and industry analysts converge to explore the evolving landscape of memory and storage. With a renewed commitment to inclusivity and innovation, FMS is shaping the future of memory and storage—especially at its intersection with artificial intelligence.

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