Fujio Masuoka

Life

Fujio Masuoka was born in Takasaki, Gunma. He attended Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, where he earned an undergraduate degree in engineering in 1966 and doctorate in 1971. He joined Toshiba in 1971. There he also developed stacked-gate avalanche-injection metal–oxide–semiconductor (SAMOS) memory. Masuoka was excited mostly by the idea of non-volatile memory, memory that would last even when power was turned off. The electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) of the time took very long to erase. He developed the "floating gate" technology that could be erased much faster. He filed a patent in 1981 along with Hisakazu Iizuka. His colleague Shoji Ariizumi suggested the word "flash" because erasure would happen as quickly as a flash of a camera. The results (with capacity of only 8192 bytes) were published in 1984, and became the basis for flash memory technology of much larger capacities.

Toshiba gave Masuoka a small bonus for the invention, but it was American company Intel which made billions of dollars in sales on related technology. He became a professor at Tohoku University in 1994. Masuoka received the 1997 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In 2005 Masuoka became the chief technical officer of Unisantis Electronics aiming to develop a three-dimensional transistor. In 2006, he settled a lawsuit with Toshiba for ¥87m (about US$758,000). He has been suggested as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Robert H. Dennard who invented dynamic random-access memory.