Eliyahou Harari is an Israeli-American business executive best known for being the co-founder of SanDisk along with

Sanjay Mehrotra Sanjay Mehrotra is an Indian-American business executive and the CEO of Micron Technology. He was a co-founder of SanDisk, and its president and CEO from 2011 until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016. Early life and education Mehro ...

Early life and education

Harari was born in 1945 in

Tel Aviv, Israel Tel Aviv-Yafo ( or , ; ), sometimes rendered as Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and usually referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the Gush Dan metropolitan area of Israel. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline and with a popula ...

. His parents were Polish Jews who at 1933 had immigrated to

Palestine Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in West Asia. Recognized by International recognition of Palestine, 147 of the UN's 193 member states, it encompasses the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and th ...

before Israel's formation. He was born and raised in Israel. He completed his Bachelor's Degree at

Manchester University The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

in England. He completed his Master's degree in Physics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

and his subject of study was semiconductors.

Career

Hughes Aircraft

As an engineering intern at Hughes Aircraft, he played a major role in the development of the world's first

EEPROM EEPROM or E2PROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) is a type of non-volatile memory. It is used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as a separate chip d ...

Intel

His first job after graduating university was at

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

. He later went to work for a number of startups, including Synertek, Wafer Scale Integration and San Disk.

SanDisk

He and

co-founded SanDisk in 1988.

Awards and recognition

He has more than 180 patents. He has received numerous awards including: * 2006 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Data Storage Device Technology Award * 2009 Robert N. Noyce Medal * 2014

National Medal of Technology The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the president of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...

* He has been inducted into the

National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a US patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also operate ...

References

Living people American chief executives of Fortune 500 companies Sandisk Western Digital people American technology chief executives 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople American computer businesspeople American chief executives of manufacturing companies Businesspeople in electronics 1945 births {{US-business-bio-1940s-stub