2019 Winner
Amber Huffman
Fellow & Chief Technologist for Data Center IP in the Silicon Engineering Group
Intel Corporation
Amber Huffman is a distinguished Fellow and Chief Technologist for Datacenter IP in the Silicon Engineering Group at Intel Corporation. She currently leads the definition of industry leading IP building blocks for Intel’s Datacenter products (which are responsible for $25B of Intel’s yearly revenue). She is a respected authority on storage, memory and IO architecture, and led Intel and the storage industry toward the definition and adoption of fast, streamlined, highly power-managed and low-latency storage interfaces. She defined, created and drove the NVMe storage standard. This included forming and chairing the NVM Express (NVMe) Workgroup, a consortium of companies that defined a standardized interface for PCI Express-based solid-state drives. She continues to chair the board of directors for the NVMe Workgroup and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) Workgroup.
Huffman joined Intel in 1998 and previously led the development of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), which remains the standard programming interface for SATA today. Subsequently, she led the technical and industry development of ONFI, which standardizes the NAND Flash memory component interface and enables customers to use Flash from various hardware vendors. She has been granted more than 20 patents in storage architecture. Huffman earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.