Federico Faggin

Federico Faggin designed the first commercial microprocessor and the silicon gate technology that made modern integrated circuits possible. Born in Vicenza, Italy in 1941, the son of a scholar of philosophy, he built a model aeroplane engine as a boy and took a technical institute diploma before a physics degree at Padua. He worked at Olivetti at nineteen, leading a small team building an experimental transistor computer, and then joined SGS-Fairchild in Italy before transferring to Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto in 1968. There he developed self-aligned silicon gate technology, replacing aluminium gates with polycrystalline silicon. Because the gate itself masks the source and drain during doping, the transistor aligns itself, which cut parasitic capacitance, allowed smaller and faster devices, and improved reliability. Essentially every MOS chip since uses it, and it is his most consequential contribution. He joined Intel in 1970 and led the design of the 4004, a four-bit processor requested by the Japanese calculator company Busicom. Ted Hoff had proposed the architecture and Stan Mazor contributed to the instruction set, but the chip did not exist until Faggin worked out how to implement it — using his silicon gate process and a bootstrap load technique — and he did the logic and circuit design and supervised the layout. It shipped in 1971 with 2,300 transistors. He signed the die with his initials, F.F. He then led the 8008 and the 8080, which became the basis of the personal computer industry. He left in 1974 to found Zilog and design the Z80, one of the most widely used processors ever made, then founded Synaptics, which developed the touchpad. He later turned to writing on consciousness.

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