Summary
Fujio Masuoka invented the technology now running in nearly every phone, SSD, and USB drive on Earth. His bosses at Toshiba told him to erase the idea, so he presented it anyway, and watched his own company hand the profits to Intel instead. Trying to fix a memory chip that took 20 minutes to erase The EEPROM problem Fujio Masuoka couldn’t leave alone Fujio Masuoka joined Toshiba’s R&D center in 1971 after finishing his PhD in engineering at Tohoku University. He worked on stacked-gate av alanche-injection MOS memory (SAMOS) in 1972, which was a precursor to EEPROM, and then DRAM during the mid 1970s. The problem with EEPROM was that it erased data slowly, byte by byte, while UV-erase EPROMs took up to 20 minutes under a special lamp. Masuoka wanted a floating-gate design that could erase the entire chip electrically in just a few seconds. In 1980, he recruited four engineers into a secret (ish) side project and filed the core patent along with his colleague Hisakazu Iizuka that year. The “flash” taming came from colleague Shoji Ariizumi, who thought the erasing procedure looked like a camera flash. According to IEEE Spectrum, Masuoka’s bosses at Toshiba told him to erase the idea, which he didn’t. Forbes noted that higher ups at Toshiba kept trying to remove him from his senior position to one with no research capabilities, but were unsuccessful. Masuoka ended up presenting his triple-polysilicon flash EEPROM design in San Francisco at the 1984 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, four years after Masuoka filed the initial patent. The rest, as they say, is history. Intel built a business on the idea Toshiba wouldn’t fund The 1984 paper Toshiba didn’t want given away inte That presentation and associated paper is what tipped off Intel, which started developing its own NOR-based flash and ended up shipping a 256kb chip in 1988, way before Toshiba had a commercial flash product out for sale. Apparently, Toshiba rewarded Masuoka with a bonus that was only “a few hundred dollars,” according to Forbes. In fact, the outlet reports that Toshiba told it that Intel invented flash memory, not its own employee. This isn’t an isolated behavior by a tech company, either. Xerox PARC ended up giving its own inventions away to a young man named Steve Jobs in 1979. Toshiba only greenlit NAND once Intel forced its hand The version of flash Masuoka actually wanted to build Toshiba ran the same delaying tactic with Masuoka’s NAND design, sitting on it for years until competitive pressure forced its hand. Corning did the same with the chemistry behind Gorilla Glass, shelving it for 40 years until Steve Jobs (again) came calling and forced the company’s hand. Losing the NOR race to Intel is probably what got Toshiba to finally fund Masuoka’s preferred NAND flash design. It sacrifices random access speed for much higher density. Because NAND flash rewrites data in blocks rather than individual bytes, it required significantly fewer transistors per bit, making mass storage far cheaper to produce. Masuoka and his colleagues presented that tech at IEDM in 1987. According to Toshiba’s own corporate history, NAND flash was invented and announced in 1987, but not commercialized until 1991, when the company shipped the first 4 Mb NAND part. Masuoka quit, then sued the company that tried to bury his own work Toshiba paid 9.1 million at the time) was fair, based on the estimated 20 billion yen Toshiba gained in profit tied to his patents. The company settled in 2006 for 87 million yen, which was about 30 storage modules pulled out of Steam Decks, sold used on eBay by the truckload. It’s not only flash memory that he invented, either. Masuoka also led the team that demoed the first gate-all-around (GAAFET) transistor back in 1988, a design that current chipmakers like Samsung and TSMC use now to build their newest processors. And just think: every phone, SSD, and USB drive that’s out there in the world today runs on the tech that Toshiba’s management ordered erased.