Ben Streetman, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Texas, told the Fort Worth Business Press that many of the researchers involved in the early days of semiconductor development may not have realised the potential it had.
In his view, it is the work of creative engineers over the years who have pushed the technology forward and driven consumer demand for devices, rather than the other way around.
He was quoted as saying: "People really didn't know they needed flash memory until it came along. I think the technology has caused the change as much as the response to it."
Mr Streetman also suggested that Moore's Law, a concept postulated in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that predicted that transistor capacity gets larger while its physical size gets smaller each year, may come to an end soon.
