•Publication Date：04/25/2014
•Source： Taiwan Today
Taiwan researcher Simon Min Sze, a national endowed chair professor of electrical engineering at Hsinchu City-based National Chiao Tung University, was honored with this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award by the U.S-based Flash Memory Summit, NCTU said April 24.
NCTU hailed Sze’s 1967 co-invention of floating gate non-volatile semiconductor memory (NVSM), which gave rise to numerous memory devices including flash memory, as the most important of his fundamental and pioneering contributions to electrical engineering.
NVSM has enabled the development of modern electronic systems, including such varied inventions as smartphones, ultrabook computers, automatic braking systems in vehicles and GPS devices, NCTU said.
Sze’s invention of NVSM was originally inspired by a layered piece of cheesecake eaten by a South Korean co-worker, Dawon Kahng, at U.S.-based Bell Telephone Laboratories, NCTU said.
According to NCTU, Sze has also made groundbreaking contributions to semiconductor devices, especially metal-semiconductor contacts, microwave devices and submicron metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor technology.
The award is the latest in a long line of domestic and international honors for Sze, who has received Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Prize and is also an academician at Taipei City-based Academia Sinica.
Sze joined National Chiao Tung University from 1990 to 2006 as a distinguished professor, following a 27-year stint at Bell Labs.
Sze has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers, as well as written and edited 16 books, NCTU said. His 1969 textbook “Physics of Semiconductor Devices” is one of the most cited works in contemporary engineering and applied science publications, which has been translated into six languages with more than 1.5 million copies printed, according to NCTU.
Presentation of the award will be made Aug. 5 at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, which is the most important global gathering for those involved in the flash memory field, NCTU said.
