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— Part of an ongoing EE Times series: Diversity & Belonging in EE.
Previous parts:
• Electro Soft CEO Karla Trotman, on Reaching the Top
• Natalia Vassilieva: ‘We Need to Treat Ourselves as Equal’ – EE Times
• Embrace D.E.I.B. to Help Fill the Giant Talent Gap – EE Times
Amber Huffman’s entry into engineering was accidental—and fortunate for the semiconductor industry: She’s an extrovert in a field that often attracts introverts but needs people to come together to collaborate.
Organizers of last month’s Flash Memory Summit recently gave Huffman a lifetime achievement award for her work in defining and driving important industry standards, beginning with her early work at Intel.
She didn’t set out be a part of the semiconductor industry, however, or even the broader technology sector.
“I did not know any engineers growing up,” Huffman told EE Times, noting that her family raised pigs in Iowa.
As a girl, Huffman intended to become a doctor or lawyer. Her English teacher, however, pointed out her aptitude for math and science and the availability of related scholarships. “I definitely needed a scholarship, and so I went into engineering.”
An Intel scholarship focused on women in science and engineering came with an internship that led to 20 years within the same group at the company—where Huffman learned to drive standards and ecosystems. “I figured out that I was good at herding cats,” she said.
In recognition of her contributions to Intel and the data-storage industry, she was named Intel Fellow in 2016—only the third woman nominated for that honor in Intel’s history, organizers of the Flash Memory Summit noted last month. She’s been granted 25 patents in storage architecture and related technologies, they added.
Huffman’s extroverted nature has proven valuable for bringing people together, especially those who prefer to be left alone to focus on their work, like writing code, she said.
Her early days at Intel focused on Serial ATA (SATA) and led to the development of its programming interface, the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI). SATA would become the dominant client and nearline data center hard drive interface and led to Huffman receiving an Intel Achievement Award. In 2004, she co-led development of CE-ATA for disk drives used in small electronics devices like the Apple iPod.
This was just the beginning of a career that’s involved fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders to develop standards that have become ubiquitous in modern day computing.
Huffman said a recurring challenge is that people talk past each other: “As engineers, we have a natural tendency to really admire the difficulty in what we do versus finding the common ground and the simplicity and coming together and making it simpler.” Her focus has been helping people find the commonality and being able to synthesize the complex—so that they come together to break down a problem and mover faster as a team.
Understanding the importance of collaboration
Now leading Google’s industry engagement in the data center ecosystem, Huffman has witnessed a huge shift in the dynamics of the semiconductor industry.
“It used to be you could just kind of go in your silo and develop something and then let something pop out,” she said. “But now things are changing so quickly that collaboration is just becoming more and more important, and then figuring out strategically where you differentiate.”
Collaboration is important, in part, because the players involved in developing standards are no longer just those in the semiconductor space. The software companies and hyperscalers are also major forces in driving the ecosystem. An example is the release of NVMe 2.5, which is targeted for October, at the 2023 OCP Global Summit. “Google’s joining in,” Huffman said.
Development of new features must be customer driven through collaboration, she added. “We know that people can’t build a different feature set for each customer. It’s just too expensive and too complex.” That’s why Google, Microsoft, Meta, Dell, HP and other companies are coming together to bring clarity.
Huffman said she was “flabbergasted” when informed she was up for the life achievement award because her achievements aren’t hers alone. “I’ve been so blessed with so many collaborators and we’ve moved the ecosystem forward,” she said. “It’s pretty cool to watch what we’ve all done together.”
Ensuring success of flash
Jim Handy, principal analyst at Objective Analysis and presenter of the award, said the Flash Memory Summit honors not only people who have invented technology or led a significant effort or company, but also those who have enabled flash to succeed. This includes original standards, as well as those started by others.
“Amber is a stellar example of somebody who has done that with her work in standards,” Handy said.
The best example of Huffman’s achievements on the standards front was co-leading the creation of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) consortium in 2006 to define a standard for flash memory chips, he said. “Before that, if you were using a Samsung part, then you couldn’t use the Toshiba part in the same socket because they were just very incompatible.”
Even if you stuck with the same vendor, he added, their latest part would be incompatible with the socket for the previous part: “You’d have to redesign your circuit board. The ONFI standard said, ‘We’re putting a stop to that. Everybody’s parts are going to play in the same socket’.”
Huffman chaired ONFI’s working group to define, create and drive the standard that was quickly adopted by the ONFI member companies. She was also instrumental in securing an industry-wide ONFI-JEDEC specification that’s proven critical to making flash memory chips inexpensive.
In 2007, Huffman founded the NVM Host Controller Interface (NVMHCI) workgroup to define a client-caching interface for use with ONFI-compatible Flash modules. Although client-caching saw limited commercial success, the emergence of PCI Express (PCIe) SSDs in 2009 gave her the opportunity to leverage “Enterprise NVMHCI” to bring these SSDs to the mainstream—an effort that led to NVM Express (NVMe), where Amber led its direction and served as the specification editor until 2017. She continues to lead the organization, as the president of NVM Express, Inc.
Other notable standards work by Huffman includes leading the development of storage form factors like the M.2 form factor. In 2017, she founded, chaired, and led the Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) Working Group, which defines form-factor standards based on a common connector, as well as features to support a range of lengths based on system need.
Building up AI, ML
Huffman views the wide adoption of NVMe as one of the most significant milestones of her career because it’s the building block of the cloud—and ultimately AI and machine learning (ML).
The generative AI happening today wouldn’t be possible without SSDs, she said, adding: “It’s pretty cool to see the way that the modern world is enabled in societal infrastructure by something that you worked on.”
Huffman doesn’t see a lifetime achievement award as a sign that it’ time to slow down; she has things to do. “I really appreciate the way that the ecosystem, when we come together, can transform things,” she said.
ONFI and NVME are just two of the many highlights, she said, and moving over to Google is expanding the landscape: “There’s a much larger purview, even beyond memory and storage.”
Huffman cited her fortune of being surrounded by people who created psychologically safe environments, especially in her early days at Intel. Such a supportive environment is essential to encouraging diversity in the sector—for not only people of color and women but also introverted men, she said.
Having battled cancer in 2014—an ordeal that included chemotherapy and a hysterectomy—Huffman took little time off and was well supported by her colleagues. “We can help keep more people excelling in this industry by supporting people through life’s inevitable challenges and failures at work, too,” she said.
