Cover image via Gemini (SAYS)
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Ask any proud Malaysian who invented the USB flash drive, and you'll likely hear the name Datuk Pua Khein-Seng, the Sekinchan-born engineer who made it big in Taiwan
Often dubbed the "father of the pendrive", Pua co-founded Phison Electronics Corp in Taiwan and helped develop what became the world's first single-chip USB flash controller in the early 2000s. The breakthrough allowed USB flash drives to become compact, cheap, and mass-producible, essentially transforming how the world stores data.
But here's where things get complicated.
Across the globe, other countries and inventors also claim credit for creating the pendrive. From Israel to Singapore to Japan, the story of the USB flash drive is less about one inventor and more about overlapping breakthroughs, strategic patents, and clever branding.
Here's a breakdown of the major players in this global tech tug-of-war:
The invention of the USB flash drive is credited to an Israeli company, M-Systems, a now-defunct company, after it was acquired by SanDisk in 2006
On 15 April 1999, Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk" and launched it commercially as DiskOnKey in partnership with IBM in 2000.
While the devices were originally only sold in Singapore, the USB flash drives started popping up everywhere in the world once the US patent was granted.
M-Systems' DiskOnKey is often recognised as the first commercially available USB flash drive. The early patents gave M-Systems a strong legal edge until it was acquired by SanDisk in 2006.
In contrast to the Israeli company's invention, Pua of Phison Electronics Corp developed the world's first single-chip USB flash controller in 2001.
By integrating both the controller and flash memory into a single chip, Pua's design made the device smaller, cheaper, and easier to mass-produce. This single-chip solution was a game-changer for scaling production.
While the boy from Sekinchan, Selangor, may not have invented the very first USB drive, his work made it commercially viable on a global scale.
However, a Singaporean company maintains that it is the original inventor of the pendrive
Trek 2000 International launched its version of a USB flash drive, called the "ThumbDrive", in 2000 at a tech fair in Germany — a full one year before Pua would go on to showcase his pendrive in Taiwan.
The Singapore-based company, led by Henry Tan, also known as Henn Tan, claims independent invention and holds several patents related to its design.
While Trek 2000 was among the first to brand and market the device under a memorable name, especially in Southeast Asia, the company did not file strong international patents and has faced disputes over the originality of their tech.
Tan was sentenced to 16 months' jail in 2022 for committing accounting fraud.
None of this would have been possible without Fujio Masuoka, though
Fujio Masuoka who?
The Japanese engineer invented NAND flash memory at Toshiba in the 1980s. His breakthrough allowed data to be stored without needing a constant power supply, a foundational technology that powers everything from USB drives to smartphones today.
While he isn't often named in the commercial race to the USB flash drive, Masuoka's work laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
Ultimately, there's no single "father" of the pendrive
It was a convergence of innovation across countries, with each contributing something different: hardware, software, branding, or scalability.
But that doesn't mean Malaysia's claim is baseless. While Pua may not have been first to patent or market the USB flash drive, his engineering breakthrough allowed it to scale globally. Without his work, we might not have had pocket-sized storage as we know it today.
And now, more than two decades later, Pua has returned to Malaysia to launch MaiStorage, a company focused on advanced microchip and AI storage tech, bringing the story full circle.
