Eli Harari

Eli Harari is an Israeli-American physicist and businessman who co-founded the flash memory company SanDisk in 1988.

born 1945Co-founding SanDiskEEPROM developmentFlash memory

Born: 10 June 1945
Education: Princeton University
Founded: 1988)

Eli Harari was born in 1945

Harari was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to Avraham and Genia, Jews who had immigrated from Poland. At 13 he was sent to Whittingham College, a Jewish boarding school in Brighton, England.

He returned to Israel in 1963 and served as a technical clerk in the Air Force. He studied physics and mathematics for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Manchester in 1969. In 1973 he completed a master's degree and a PhD in solid state physics at Princeton University.

He worked at Rockwell and Hughes Aircraft on cosmic radiation effects on semiconductors and on EEPROM technology. In 1979 Dov Frohman recruited him to Intel, where he led a development team in Santa Clara for 2 years. He then served as chief technology officer at Synertek and founded WSI in 1983.

In 1988 he co-founded SanDisk with Sanjay Mehrotra and Jack Yuan to develop and make flash memory. The company went public in 1995, and Harari, its CEO and chairman, retired in 2010. He holds more than 180 US patents and lives in California with his wife Brit.

Milestones in Eli Harari's life

1945
Born in Tel Aviv.
1963
Returned to Israel and joined the Air Force.
1969
Earned a physics degree at the University of Manchester.
1973
Completed a PhD at Princeton University.
1979
Joined Intel.
1983
Founded WSI.
1988
Co-founded SanDisk.
1995
SanDisk went public.
2009
Received the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal.
2017
Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Eli Harari served in the military

From 1963 he served as a technical clerk in the Israeli Air Force and was released early to study. He completed his service years later as a lecturer to Air Force officers.