"Can you explain this more? I never heard of Dov Frohman or the Technion."
The Technion is a leading tecnical university, located in Haifa. Think of it as Israel's MIT.
Dov Frohman invented the UV-erasable floating gate EPROM, where electrons are avalanche-injected onto a polysilicon gate that is completely isolated from all other circuts, thus allowing them to be stored for years or even decades without refreshing.
The electrons are allowed to leak away when intense UV light irradiates the array. (A few months or so of rooftop sunlight will not erase the cells, as we determined many times in experiments, and neither will airport x-rays, a common misconception. Basically, several kilorads or more are needed.)
Dov wished to return to Israel to teach at the Technion but to also remain affilliated with Intel. Hence the Israel Design Center, which drew on Dov and his students.
By the way, another famous Technion professor is Adi Shamir, one of the inventors of RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman). He was at MIT, along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman, when this work was done, circa 1976-77.
--Tim May |
