Silicon Storage Technology

In the late 1980s, Bing Yeh and his cofounder assembled a small team of engineers in a rented office on Apollo Way in Sunnyvale, Calif., to develop a new breed of nonvolatile memory technology—SuperFlash—for code or data storage in electronic systems and embedded memory for integrated logic circuits. Yeh had spent more than 10 years working at Intel, Honeywell, and Xicor before starting Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. (SST) in August 1989. In 1993 SST moved to its current headquarters on Sonora Court in Sunnyvale.

Nonvolatile memory devices retain data without a continuous supply of power. Virtually every microprocessor or microcontroller-based electronic system requires nonvolatile memory to store program code consisting of a basic instruction set critical to the operation of the system. Prior to 1989, read-only memory (ROM), UV-light erasable PROM (EPROM), electrically erasable PROM (EEPROM), and the then-emerging FLASH memory created a succession of increasingly useful nonvolatile memory products for this purpose. However, these nonvolatile technologies either lack certain important functionality or are too expensive.

SST’s new SuperFlash technology, because of its small-sector erase and fast reprogramming, did not have those deficiencies and was quickly adopted by the electronics industry after it introduced its first product in 1993. By the end of 1995, more than 90% of the PC motherboards produced in Taiwan had adopted SST’s 1Mbit SuperFlash EEPROM product for the BIOS storage, thanks to SuperFlash’s ability to provide the “plug-and-play” functionality needed for the just-introduced Windows 95 operating system. Riding on this success, SST went public on the NASDAQ market in November 1995.

During the next 10 years, SST continued to work with its wafer foundry partners and technology licensees, including Sanyo, Seiko Epson, Samsung, and TSMC, to introduce a wide range of low- to medium density memory products and quickly expanded their applications beyond PCs. By the end of 2006, SST and its licensees had shipped more than seven billion integrated circuits based on SuperFlash technology. SST products are now used by almost every major electronic system manufacturer and can be found in virtually every type of IT and consumer product. The applications of SuperFlash products include PCs, PDAs, hard disk drives, optical disk drives, printers, cellular phones, smart cards, GPS devices, digital TVs, MP3 players, DVD players, digital cameras and camcorders, video games, talking toys, electronic books, Wi-Fis, cable/DSL modems, set-top boxes, Bluetooth modules, and many others.

In 2004, SST began a major initiative to transform itself from a pure-play in flash to a more diversified company, with multiple product lines targeting the rapidly growing consumer and industrial products with embedded solid-state data storage and RF wireless communication capabilities. Today, SST is the fifth largest NOR flash supplier in the world and is a major supplier of integrated circuits addressing the requirements of high-volume applications in the Internet computing, digital consumer, networking, and wireless communications markets.

At the fall 1992 Comdex show, SST introduced the world’s first single-board 30 MByte 2.5” solidstate-disk drive with standard hard-disk ATA interface and a 5 MByte PCMCIA memory card with built-in controller and firmware. Before the show, typical notebook computer storage was a 2.5” hard disk drive with 20 MByte capacity. Because SST’s solid-state storage products were way ahead of their time, SST decided to focus on the memory component business after the 1992 Comdex show.