Also known as: Federico Faggin

Federico Faggin (born 1941) is an Italian-American physicist and engineer who led the design of the Intel 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor, putting a whole CPU on a single chip.¹

Life and work

Faggin developed the silicon-gate process for integrated circuits at Fairchild, a technique that made faster, denser chips practical. At Intel from 1970, he led the design and methodology that turned the 4004 project into a working microprocessor in 1971, and he later worked on the 8080.¹ He then co-founded Zilog, where he created the influential Z80 microprocessor, and went on to found Synaptics, an early developer of touchpad and touchscreen technology.¹

Why they matter

The 4004 collapsed a computer’s processing unit onto one piece of silicon, launching the microprocessor era that made every later personal computer, microcontroller, and embedded SDR node possible. Faggin’s silicon-gate method became standard across the chip industry, and his hand-drawn signature even appears in the 4004’s layout.¹

Legacy

He received the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his role in inventing the microprocessor, a device now embedded in nearly every electronic product.

Sources

1. Federico Faggin — Wikipedia, for biography, the Intel 4004, and silicon-gate technology. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

See also

• Central processing unit (CPU)
• Intel
• Integrated circuit
• Semiconductor