Flash Memory Summit announces lifetime achievement award winner 2023

Huffman is being recognised for her achievements in bringing flash storage into the mainstream of the data storage industry by founding and driving the standards that have made flash memory a mainstream storage medium for virtually all computing applications. FMS will honour Huffman for her accomplishments during the annual summit on Tuesday, August 8, at 11:30am PDT.

Huffman is receiving this prestigious award for her part in establishing and leading industry organisations whose standards have accelerated the adoption of NAND flash in computing systems:

• The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI), which standardised NAND chip interfaces to work with all chips, regardless of supplier or revision level
• NVM Express (NVMe), an alternative to HDD-oriented storage interfaces that takes advantage of flash's particular strengths, and enables storage class memory including persistent memory
• The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), the programming interface for Serial ATA (SATA), to enable scaling beyond hard drive limitations to allow SSDs to gain widespread market penetration
• Board member of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation, and OCP Storage Project co-lead, to drive common datacentre SSD requirements for broad adoption of advanced features
• Board member of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), which provides the path to integrate persistent memory into SoC packages

Huffman has shown outstanding leadership in all of these and other standards. She also founded NVM Express, Inc., served as the specification editor until 2017, and continues to lead the organisation forward as its President. Her work defined and drove a standard that, like ONFI, has proven to be transformative throughout the industry.

Huffman is a Principal Engineer at Google Cloud, where she is responsible for steering Google's industry engagement in the datacentre ecosystem including storage, servers, networking, and accelerators. Previously, she worked at Intel for over 25 years as an Intel Fellow and VP, and she has been granted 25 patents in data storage architecture and related technologies.

Huffman is known as an inclusive leader and passionate mentor, including serving on the Global Semiconductor Alliance Women's Leadership Council and the University of Michigan's Computer Science & Engineering National Advisory Board. Recent honour include being the inaugural recipient of Flash Memory Summit's and Evaluator Group's first SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award in 2018, and recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Rising Women of Influence Award in 2019.