The story
Early years (1996–2006)
Lexar was founded by Petro Estakhri and Mike Assar in 1996 as a spin-off from Cirrus Logic. Products manufactured by Lexar include SD cards, CompactFlash cards, USB flash drives, card readers and solid-state drives. Once a division of Cirrus Logic, Lexar leveraged its parent company's experience in building ATA controllers in developing its own flash controllers.
In 2002, Lexar filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, alleging that Toshiba had copied its NAND flash memory technology. In 2005, a California jury initially awarded Lexar $465 million in damages, after which Toshiba filed an appeal. In September 2006, following Lexar’s acquisition by Micron Technology, Toshiba agreed to settle all outstanding litigation by purchasing certain patents and rights previously owned by Lexar for $288 million.
Under Micron ownership (2006–2017)
Micron Technology acquired Lexar in 2006. In September 2007, Lexar extended its agreement with Eastman Kodak Company to develop and market Kodak-branded flash memory products worldwide.
On June 26, 2017, Micron (the then-owner of the brand) announced it was to discontinue the Lexar retail removable media storage business and put part or all of the business up for sale.
Under Longsys ownership (2017–present)
On August 31, 2017, the Lexar brand and trademark rights were acquired by Longsys, a flash memory company based in Shenzhen, China.
In 2018, Lexar reentered the flash storage market.
In January 2019, the company unveiled the first SD card with a storage capacity of 1 terabyte (TB).
In December 2019, Lexar demonstrated a prototype 7.5 GB/s PCIe 4.0 SSD which is set to be the world's fastest consumer SSD.
Read the full text
In April 2020, Lexar released its world's smallest memory card (nCARD) featuring Xtacking tech from Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC).
In June 2020, Lexar announced its entry to the DRAM market by unveiling seven different DDR4-2666 memory kits for mainstream laptops and desktops. Lexar also plans to release faster, 3000 MHz and 3200 MHz memory kits in the future, along with kits "with heatsinks and RGB lighting", targeting gamers and enthusiasts.
From Wikipedia’s article on Lexar, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4