How USB Pen Drives Evolved in 25 Years and Their Futuristic Designs

The Beginning of Pen Drives
The USB flash drive, which today is universally known as a pen drive, was invented by Fujio Masuoka in the 1980s. A pen drive was formerly known as flash memory, a kind of floating-gate semiconductor memory. To store data floating gate MOSFET transistors were utilized as retention cells, to hold data.

Since then, many folks have claimed to be an inventor of the USB storage drive:

At the beginning of the 21st century, Amir Ban, Oron Ogden, and Dov Moran from an Israeli company named M systems
Shimon Shmueli an engineer from IBM company
Trek 2000 International, a Singaporean organization, claimed to have commercially sold the first USB storage drive
Pua Khein Seng, an engineer from Malaysia are few patent filers and probable inventors of the revolutionary device. This finger size gizmo weighs less than 30 grams depending upon the designs and specifications.

Inside Pendrive Device
Inside Pendrive Device

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Pendrive Technology
The tiny gadget consists of an Electric Circuit board comprising of surface-mounted integrated circuits known as ICs, Write-Protect switch, Crystal oscillator, Test points, Controller device, information storage chip, LED light, and USB Connector.

As technology advanced the speed of data transfer increased exponentially which is governed by the speed of the controller device to read, write and transfer encrypted information and secondly by the speed of the hardware bus. Today USB 3.0 version drives are considered the fastest and high-performance device which could technically read at 92 MB/s and write at 70 MB/s which might differ radically when tested. The Latest high-capacity pendrives are equipped with temperature controllers, over current and short circuit protection chips, security keys, and biometric locks. Its been a long journey from version USB 2.0 to USB 3.0.