Flash Memory Lifetime Achievement Award 2023

Lifetime Achievement Award - 2023

Amber Huffman

Amber Huffman is the recipient of the 2023 Flash memory Summit Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in defining and driving important industry standards, including ONFI, NVMe, and form factors, which were quickly adopted throughout the industry.

Entry to the Industry

Amber received a scholarship from Intel during her undergraduate work that included an internship. She was fortunate to join Intel Fellow Knut Grimsrud's team where she learned the art of standards and ecosystem development, and then went on to partner with Knut on several influential standards.

Hard Drive Standards

Amber's early work at Intel focused on Serial ATA (SATA), where she led development of its programming interface, Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI). SATA became the dominant client and nearline datacenter hard drive interface, leading to Amber's receipt of an Intel Achievement Award. In 2004, she co-led development of CE-ATA for disk drives used in small electronics devices such as the Apple iPod.

Flash Standards

Prior to 2006, NAND flash was the only commodity memory without a standard. Amber co-led creation of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) consortium to define such a standard for flash memory chips. As Chair of its Working Group, she defined, created, and drove the standard that was quickly adopted by the ONFI member companies. She drove a collaboration between ONFI and JEDEC to secure an industry-wide ONFI-JEDEC specification that has proven critical to making flash memory chips inexpensive.

In 2007, Amber founded the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface (NVMHCI) Workgroup to define a client caching interface for use with ONFI-compatible Flash modules. However, client caching saw limited commercial success.

In 2009, as PCI Express SSDs emerged (e.g., Fusion-io), Amber drove "Enterprise NVMHCI" to bring these SSDs to the mainstream. This effort ultimately became NVM Express (NVMe), where Amber led its direction, served as the specification editor until 2017, and continues to lead the organization forward as the President of NVM Express, Inc. NVMe is used by SSDs from the laptop to the data center, thereby making the decades-old paradigm for a data storage interface obsolete. Amber was promoted to Intel Fellow in 2016 for the impact of her standards work.

Continued Standards Evolution and Form Factors

Amber continued driving revisions of the NVMe and ONFI standards needed for each successive generation of product. She co-led development of storage form factors including the M.2 form factor. In 2017, she founded, chaired and led the Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) Working Group. EDSFF defines form factor standards based on a common connector, as well as features to support a range of lengths based on system need. This work unified what had been a fragmented effort for standardizing datacenter SSDs, and which has begun replacing the M.2 and U.2 form factors in data centers.

Data Center and IP Leadership

From 2017 to 2021, Amber continued to lead NVMe and ONFI, with her primary focus shifting to the data center platform and then IP technologies in support of Intel's Xeon® product lines. Her last role at Intel was Chief Technologist in the IP Engineering Group where she led the definition of industry leading IP building blocks (including memory and IO) across Intel's entire product portfolio.

Leading Ecosystem Engagement at Google Cloud

In 2021, Amber joined Google Cloud to return to her passion. She leads Google's industry engagement in the datacenter ecosystem to enable easy integration of a broad array of technology into its datacenters, including its servers, storage, networks, accelerators, power, cooling, and security.

Amber serves on the Board of the Open Compute Project (OCP) and the Board of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium. In 2023, she led formation of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project and chairs the organization. Amber continues to lead the NVM Express organization as well as technical developments for Google including Flexible Data Placement and Live Migration.

Recognized for Delivering Impactful Change

In recognition of Amber Huffman's important contributions to both Intel and the data storage industry, she was named Intel Fellow in 2016 - only the 3rd woman nominated for that honor in Intel's history. She has been granted 25 patents in storage architecture and related technologies.

Amber is known across the industry not only as an evangelist and diplomat who makes things happen, but also as an inclusive leader and a passionate mentor. In 2018 she was the first recipient of Flash Memory Summit's and The Evaluator Group's SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award, and in 2019 she received the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Rising Women of Influence Award. She now serves on the GSA Women's Leadership Council, and the University of Michigan's Computer Science & Engineering National Advisory Board.

Comments from the Industry

"Amber's technical influence in the computing and datacenter ecosystem space cannot be overstated. Throughout her career Amber has been instrumental to driving consensus and action around new standards that moved the entire data storage industry forward," said Amin Vahdat, Vice President and General Manager, Systems, and Cloud AI, Google Cloud. "Not only has she impacted the technology, but she has made a lasting impact on the community as well, serving in key leadership roles along the way. I am excited to see Amber's achievements in this space recognized and look forward to witnessing her contributions in the years to come."

"Amber Huffman's lifetime work in driving NAND flash and interface standards – and the technologies behind them – has been profoundly transformational to the industry," said Rich Uhlig, Intel Senior Fellow, CVP and Director of Intel Labs. "She is an inspiration not only for what she has accomplished, but how she did it – always seeking to support and coach the technologists around her to reach new heights of innovation as a community. It is wonderful to see her leadership recognized!"

"Amber's work and vision enabled flash storage to move from simply a faster, more-expensive hard disk drive replacement to the dominant storage technology from the laptop to the data center," said Chuck Sobey, Flash Memory Summit General Chair. "We are delighted to showcase her contributions, and are looking forward to her continuing leadership in our industry."

2023 Lifetime Achievement Award winner Amber Huffman (holding award) with (from left) FMS Program Chair Tom Coughlin,
and FMS Lifetime Achievement Award committee members Brian Berg, Chuck Sobey, and Jim Handy

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