Flash Memory Summit's Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) recognizes individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting the development and use of flash memory and/or associated or related technologies, including one or more of the following:

• Creating or promoting an important flash technology, a flash-related technology, or a technology to supersede flash,
• Leadership of a major flash company or business effort,
• Bringing flash technology to a new and important application.

LAA winners may be a single person, or a small team with an important connection.

By bestowing this award, Flash Memory Summit hopes to help foster further advances in the fastest-growing technology of the semiconductor industry.

LAA Committee members Chuck Sobey and Brian Berg, 2019 LAA recipient Sanjay Mehrotra, and LAA Committee member Jim Handy

2019: Sanjay Mehrotra, for co-founding SanDisk, advancing the architecture that enabled the industry and marketplace for flash memory, and leadership of Micron Technology, Inc. and the Semiconductor Industry Association.
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2018: Dov Moran and Aryeh Mergi, for innovations including embedded flash for cell phones, flash file systems, and the USB flash drive.
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2017: George Perlegos, for EPROM, EEPROM and Flash chip design and fabrication inventions at Intel, SEEQ and ATMEL.
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2016: Dr. Kinam Kim, for leadership, strategic direction and inventions in 3D NAND and high density storage at Samsung.
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2015: Robert "Bob" Norman, for being the key System Architect of "System-Flash" in 1989. System-Flash uses a processor and firmware to manage the flash cells using techniques including wear leveling, error correction, low-stress write/erase and the Flash Translation Layer to make SSDs plug-compatible replacements for disk drives.
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2014: Dr. Simon Sze, for co-inventing the floating gate in 1967. Working at Bell Labs, Drs. Sze and Dawon Kahng invented a silicon device that insulated a charge which could represent a non-volatile memory bit. This was the basis of Intel's EPROM, and later the EEPROM and the Flash EEPROM.

2013: Dr. Fujio Masuoka, for the conception of flash memory in 1984. Flash Memory was a new type of EEPROM device which required only a single transistor to store data, and whose name was based on an architecture which allowed erasure of an entire memory chip in a single operation - or in a "flash."

2012: Dr. Eli Harari, for creating a practical and reliable floating gate, and for inventions enabling data storage in flash memory. Harari discovered the thin silicon dioxide necessary for a reliable floating gate EEPROM (1976-78), and this was essential for flash memory as well. He also invented MLC flash, as well as an architecture suitable for data storage in flash (1988).

2011: Intel’s Flash Memory Team (Dr. Richard Pashley, Dr. Stefan Lai, Bruce McCormick and Niles Kynett), for bringing to market ETOX NOR in 1988. This was first successful flash memory product, and its later generations became a multi-billion dollar business in the 1990s.