Sandisk Corporation’s Eli Harari to Receive 2009 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal

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

MILPITAS, CA, June 23, 2009 -- 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.

Source: SanDisk Corporation