Japanese Invented Flash Memory
In 1980s, Japan became the number-one semiconductor country, though Intel was leading the microprocessor field.
However, today Japan cannot enjoy the status as it did before. Major Japanese semiconductor manufacturers are also large electronics companies that deliver various electronic products for consumers and industry users, including TVs, refrigerators, and nuclear plant equipment. They did not put the highest priority in semiconductors. Those Japanese makers were also contaminated by red-tape management and bureaucratic processes. They had almost nothing to do with the venture spirit. Accordingly, some Japanese engineers in major companies, their subsidiary companies, or even their vendors became frustrated.
Accordingly, Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean businesses never turned a blind eye to this situation in the Japanese industry. These Asian makers tried everything to gain access to Japanese advanced technologies, virtually stealing key technical information.
March 13, 2014 6:39 pm JSTThe shares of world makers in sales of NAND-type flash memory in 2012 are as follows:
Man arrested for allegedly giving Toshiba data to South Korean company
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Tokyo police on Thursday arrested a man suspected of illegally providing a South Korean company with Toshiba Corp. research data from on flash memory.
Yoshitaka Sugita, 52, from Fukuoka Prefecture in southwestern Japan, was an engineer at SanDisk Corp., a semiconductor maker that had formed an alliance with Toshiba in flash memory production, and was able to obtain research data, according to the police.
It is rare for a technology leak to a foreign company to result in a criminal case.
Toshiba said later in the day that it had filed a damages suit with the Tokyo District Court against SK Hynix Inc., the predecessor of which allegedly obtained the data from the suspect, asserting that the South Korean company wrongfully acquired and used its proprietary technical information.
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Comp
No. 1 Samsung (South Korea)...........37%
No. 2 Toshiba (JAPAN)........................31%
No. 3 Micron Technology (US)..........14%
No. 4 SK Hynix (S. Korea)...................11%
Others..............................................................7%
Truly the flash memory was invented by a Japanese engineer of Toshiba, named Fujio Masuoka.
Fujio Masuoka: Inventor of Flash Memory
BY RD BENTLEY ON AUGUST 26, 2011 IN TECHNOLOGY
Flash memory is a term that applies to two types of chips — the NAND and the NOR. The NAND is used in: memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and more. Both NOR and NAND types were invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka around 1980.
Examples of both types of flash memory include: personal computers, PDAs, digital audio players, digital cameras, mobile phones, synthesizers, video games, scientific instrumentation, industrial robotics, and medical electronics.
Flash memory turned out to be one of the greatest inventions of the 1980's. According to a Forbes report, approximately $76 billion of these chips were sold in 2001 alone. According to BusinessWeek, flash memory sales hit around $25 billion in 2006 alone. While these figures may not be totally accurate, it gives us a good idea how important this invention was.
Toshiba and Samsung have been two of the world's top flash memory producers.
At the time Fujio Masuoka had discovered flash memory, he was working for Toshiba. However, because he lived in Japan and worked for a powerful company, he didn't get the full credit that was due.
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Masuoka had been working on DRAM when he came across his discovery in the early 1980's. It was the year of 1984 when he would announce his invention, during an IEEE meeting in San Francisco, California.
Dr. Masuoka eventually got promoted to the head of a department, but he would leave Toshiba in 1994. Masuoka later became a professor at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.It is said Mr. Masuoka volunteered for sales business in the US when he was a young engineer of Toshiba. It is because no matter high quality memory he designed in Toshiba office in Japan, sales of advanced memory products were low. So, he wanted to promote sales in the US for himself. But his business performance in the US was so poor, and thus soon Masuoka was called back to Japan to settle in his old R&D department. But Masuoka learnt that US customers wanted inexpensive products with the minimum necessary functionality. This experience led to his future invention of the flash memory. A kind of technical rationalization was a key to the invention.
http://thecyberdaily.com/2011/08/fujio-masuoka-inventor-of-flash-memory/
However, Toshiba did not give more opportunities for research and development to Mr. Masuoka. Later he became the deputy director of a research center of Toshiba but was not given resources enough to drive his own study on semiconductor. So, he eventually left Toshiba, one of the best manufacturer in Japan to take a position in a university.
Put simply, foolishness, arrogance, and even evil in the Japanese industrial community have triggered a large scale technology transfer, legally or illegally, or overtly or covertly, to Samsung and other South Korean countries as well as Chinese and other makers.
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Mar 4:8 And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.