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SanDisk’s Eli Harari To Receive 2009 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal


WEBWIRE

Prestigious Award Recognizes Harari’s Leadership in Development and Commercialization of Flash Memory Technology

Milpitas, Calif. – SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) today announced that the company’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, Eli Harari, will receive the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal at the IEEE Honors Ceremony on Thursday, June 25 in Los Angeles. IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The award recognizes Harari’s innovation of flash memory technology, contribution to the proliferation of flash memory devices, and visionary leadership within the semiconductor industry.

Dr. Harari, along with his colleagues Sanjay Mehrotra, president and COO, and Jack Yuan, founded SanDisk in 1988. Their vision was to create a revolutionary, low cost storage technology based on new flash semiconductor memory that would replace film, magnetic tape and rotating magnetic disk drives and enable new large consumer markets. SanDisk has achieved its founders’ vision and it has grown into the global leader in flash memory cards, with total revenues in excess of $3.35 billion in 2008, selling consumer flash memory products at more than 240,000 retail outlets worldwide.

“This award is a wonderful recognition of the breakthroughs achieved by SanDisk in the past 21 years,” said Eli Harari, chairman and CEO, SanDisk. “I have been fortunate to work with a supremely capable team, dedicated to transforming our bold vision into reality. Today hundreds of millions of people worldwide entrust their memories to SanDisk, and the entire SanDisk team has a share in this great honor. For me personally this award carries particular meaning, coming on the 50th anniversary of Bob Noyce’s co-inventing the integrated circuit, an invention that profoundly changed the course of history.”

Under Harari’s leadership, SanDisk invented flash mass storage cards and pioneered USB flash drives, developed the CompactFlash® flash memory card format and co-developed the SD™, microSD™, Memory Stick PRO™ and Memory Stick PRO Duo™ card formats. Harari was instrumental in the transition from NOR-based flash memory to NAND-based flash memory as well as the invention and development of multilevel cell data storage. When combined with state-of-the-art semiconductor processes executed at the leading edge, these technologies resulted in the densest, lowest-cost-per-bit, nonvolatile solid-state memory possible.

SanDisk successfully developed and implemented 14 consecutive generations of flash memory chips, thereby reducing the cost of flash storage by more than 10,000 times cumulatively. These unprecedented cost reductions proved the key factor in fueling the explosive growth of large scale flash storage markets.

The commercialization of flash memory has reshaped the consumer electronics landscape, enabling content on-the-go any time, anywhere. Flash imaging cards and flash-based MP3 players helped enable the digital photography and music revolutions, replacing 35mm film as well as tapes and CDs. Flash USB drives and solid state drives (SSD) have set new standards in removable and internal storage, and are poised to supplant optical media like DVDs and hard disk drives.

SanDisk continues to pioneer flash memory technology with the commercialization of 3-bits per cell (X3) and 4-bits per cell (X4) flash memory chips, which are the most advanced multi-level cell technologies available to date. SanDisk holds more than 1,700 patents worldwide, generating $508 million in license and royalty revenue for 2008.

Harari holds a doctorate degree in solid state sciences from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Manchester University. In addition to inventing the floating gate EEPROM, the precursor to flash, Harari’s technical resume includes more than 100 U.S. and foreign patents and numerous technical publications.

About SanDisk
SanDisk Corporation is the global leader in flash memory cards – from research, manufacturing and product design to consumer branding and retail distribution. SanDisk’s product portfolio includes flash memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras and camcorders; digital audio/video players; USB flash drives for consumers and the enterprise; embedded memory for mobile devices; and solid state drives for computers. SanDisk is a Silicon Valley-based S&P 500 company, with more than half its sales outside the United States.

SanDisk’s web site/home page address: http://www.sandisk.com
SanDisk’s product and executive images can be downloaded from
http://www.sandisk.com/corporate/mediakit
SanDisk, the SanDisk logo and Compactflash are trademarks of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. SD, microSD and miniSD are trademarks of SD-3C LLC. Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo are registered trademarks of Sony Corporation. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for new product introductions, technology and applications that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others: there may be a slower adoption rate for these products in new markets that we are targeting or market demand for these products may grow more slowly than our expectations, these products and accessories may not perform as expected, and the other risks detailed from time-to-time in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We do not intend to update the information contained in this press release.



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