USB flash drive

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The inventors of the USB flash drive are Amir Ban, Dov Moran and Oron Ogdan of the Israeli company M-Systems. On April 5, 1999, they applied for a patent titled "Universal Serial Bus-based PC Flash Drive Architecture". The patent was granted on November 14, 2000.

IBM engineer Shimon Shmueli, Singapore-based Trek 2000 International, and Malaysian engineer Pua Khein-Seng are also credited with authorship.

The basis of flash drives is a floating-gate semiconductor memory on MOSFET transistors invented by Fuji Masuoka in the early 1980s.

Fuji Masuoka was a Japanese inventor who worked at Toshiba since 1971. He worked on the development of a new non-volatile storage concept. Masuoka patented flash memory. In 1981, at the International Electronics Developers Conference, Intel expressed interest in his invention, and in 1998 the company released the first commercial flash chip.

The USB interface was developed and put into production in 1995.

The flash drive was named DiskOnkey. The first drives had 8 MB of memory, with 32 MB and 64 MB models appearing later in the year. The cost of an 8 MB drive was $50, which was a lot for the amount of memory that could fit in 5 floppy disks.

Back then, in the era of the Windows 98 operating system, you had to install drivers from the disk that came with the flash drive.

In the mid-2000s, Amir Ban together with Semyon Licin invented the X4 technology, which allowed to fundamentally increase the density of information recording: memory became much more, the price — much lower.

Every year the volume of flash drives increases, as well as write/read speeds, and now devices with 2TB memory are available.

In 2006, Dov Moran, owner of M-Systems, sold the company to SanDisk for $1.6 billion.

Key components of the drive

• USB interface for physical connection to a computer.
• The controller is a small microcontroller with built-in ROM and RAM.
• NAND chip for information storage.
• Quartz oscillator to generate synchronizing signal (12 MHz) for USB bus.
• Enclosure to protect electronics from mechanical impact and possible short circuits.
  

Advantages of the drive

• Light weight, quiet operation and portability.
• Versatility: modern computers, TVs and media players have USB ports.
• Low power consumption due to lack of mechanical systems.
• Operability in a wide range of temperatures.
• Resistant to mechanical effects (vibration and shock), as well as to magnetic fields (unlike hard disks).
• Resistance to scratches and dust, which have been a problem with optical media and floppy disks.
• Ability to store data offline for a relatively long period of time (up to 10 years).

Disadvantages of the drive

• Limited number of write-erase cycles before failure. Memory chips made with MLC technology (most of them) most often can withstand no more than 5000 rewrite cycles. In addition, USB connector life is limited to about 1500 connections.
• Write and read speeds are limited by USB bandwidth, which is especially pronounced for USB 2.0 (no more than 35 MB/s).
• Unlike CD-ROMs, sensitive to ESD and radiation.
• Unsymmetrical interface with a symmetrical-looking connector, which makes it not always possible to connect at once (the problem is solved in USB Type-C).

Dov Moran

Dov Moran was born on July 29, 1955 in Ramat Gan to a family of repatriates from Poland.

He attended high school in Herzliya.

From 1976-1985 he served in the Israeli Navy and was commander of the microprocessor department.

He received a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering with honors from the Technion.

In 1989, he founded M-Systems.

In 2007, he founded Modu, which developed a small modular cell phone, selling its patents to Google in 2011.

In October 2010, introduced the lightest touchscreen phone in the world, the Modu T. He said that he was already working on an idea for an Android phone model, a cell-free wi-fi device that Moran called a "wiphone".

In 2011, he founded and became chairman of Comigo, which developed a multi-screen platform for pay-TV operators.

In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Moscow State Technical University of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation (MIREA).

In 2016, he received an honorary doctorate from the Technion and became a managing partner of Grove Ventures, a venture capital fund that announced it would focus on investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

He holds more than 40 patents.

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