Federico Faggin

Designer of the microchip

• Born: December 1, 1941
• Place of Birth: Vicenza, Italy

Primary Company/Organization:Synaptics

Introduction

Federico Faggin is a physicist and electrical engineer whose best-known project is the design of the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971, as well as other influential chips behind the computer revolution: the 8008, the 8080, and the Z80. Faggin was the guiding force during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. These chips were used for a variety of purposes, especially the first home computers, including the Altair 8800 kit and the TRS-80 from RadioShack. More than forty years later, his innovations are still being used in the Pentium chips that power many computers. Starting in 1981, Faggin began a life as an entrepreneur and founded several successful companies, notably Synaptics, creator of the touchpad. Among his many honors are the 2010 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Early Life

Federico Faggin was born December 1, 1941, in Vicenza, Italy, the son of Giuseppe Faggin, a teacher of the history of philosophy and general history, and Emma Faggin. Two years later, after the fall of fascism, his family moved to the countryside to escape Allied bombing during World War II and returned to Vicenza when Faggin was eight years old. It was his father's hope that Faggin would study the humanities, but Faggin was fascinated by anything mechanical from an early age. He attended a technical high school, the A. Rossi Technical Institute in Vicenza, where he studied radio technology and electronics. In 1960, immediately after high school, he worked as an assistant engineer at business machine developer Olivetti Electronic R&D Laboratory near Milan. There, at the age of nineteen, he designed his first computer, using germanium transistors and magnetic core memory. It was 7 feet high and as wide as a door frame.

After this initial experience with computers, Faggin decided he needed to remedy his lack of advanced education and entered the University of Padua to study physics. He chose physics because he felt it would provide a better foundation for future endeavors than further study of engineering. He undertook a program of study that typically took five to seven years and completed it in four while working and tutoring. He received his doctorate in physics, summa cum laude, on December 1, 1965, his twenty-fourth birthday. After teaching briefly, he worked for CERES corporation, a small high-tech start-up begun by his former supervisor at Olivetti, and in 1967 he joined SGS Fairchild in Agrate Brianza, about twelve miles from Milan.

Life's Work

At SGS Fairchild, Faggin used metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) technology to design the company's first two MOS-integrated circuits. MOS circuits were smaller and easier to fabricate than those that used the then-prevalent bipolar technology; although MOS circuits were slower, they had the potential of carrying more logical gates with the same expenditure of power.

In 1968, Faggin visited Palo Alto, California, to study at SGS Fairchild's licensing company, Fairchild Semiconductor, and took classes that Stanford University was offering for employees. This research exchange program between the two companies was supposed to last six months, but Faggin stayed in the United States. At Fairchild, he worked on silicon gate technology, and his silicon gate integrated circuits were commercially available in 1968. This technology would be used for computer memory and the first microprocessor. While at Fairchild, Faggin also developed two ideas that would be important to microprocessors: the buried contact and the bootstrap load. These improved the speed and density of silicon gate technology, so that it would compete with chips made with metal gates. Within a few years, the entire industry had switched to silicon gates for its new designs, and the technology is still in use today.

In June 1968, Gordon E. Moore urged Faggin to give a paper at the International Electron Devices Meeting in October, and Faggin decided to remain at Fairchild rather than return to Italy. A month later, Moore and Robert Noyce, along with twenty other Fairchild employees, unexpectedly went to work at the newly formed Intel. Faggin expected that Intel would try to exploit his silicon gate technology, and this turned out to be true: Intel sought to replace magnetic core memory with semiconductor memory. Faggin later said that he was not initially invited to join the company because that would have tipped IBM's hand to Fairchild. Nevertheless, Faggin left Fairchild in 1970 to design a new chip for his former coworkers. While working on the Busicom Project, a design of seven chips for a calculator's integrated circuit, he took over work started by Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor. Hoff had proposed to combine the three chips that would be used as the central processing unit (CPU), and Mazor had come up with the basic concept for the new proposal requiring only four chips, but no designs for the chips had been made; they were waiting for Faggin to complete the work on what came to called the 4000 family.

The combination of the three integrated circuits for the CPU, Faggin would remark later, was barely possible using existing processes, and no one had designed a chip of that complexity before. In fact, Intel had never designed a random-logic chip such as this, and there were few resources that it could provide to Faggin, given that its talent was busy designing computer memory. Although all four of the chips Faggin designed had novel features, the project is remembered for the design of the CPU: the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor. Faggin was so proud of his work that he signed his initials on the metal mask. The first 4004s arrived in the lab at the end of 1970, but they did not work; a technician had forgotten the buried contact. It took three weeks for new chips to be delivered, and these worked as expected. The 4004 was the first microprocessor, a sixteen-pin chip that held twenty-three hundred transistors and operated at 740 kilohertz, built nine years after Faggin had built his first computer with transistors. After negotiating with the Japanese company Busicom, which had commissioned the project, Intel advertised the arrival of the microprocessor in November 15, 1971, issue of Electronic News.

Faggin's methodology would be reused for other Intel microprocessors and microcontrollers. While the 4004 was still in the design phase, Mazor promised the Computer Terminal Corporation that Intel could design a CPU chip for it, not just the memory. Even though he was not a chip designer and the 4004 was not completed, he was able to get a contract for a new design, the 1201. Although work on the 1201 began at the same time that Faggin had joined Intel, its development stalled out. The project was put on hold until Faggin finished the 4004. Using what he had learned while working on the 4004, Faggin completed the work on the 1201 by the end of 1971; it was the first 8-bit microprocessor, and when sold by Intel starting in April 1972, it was referred to by the name 8008. It had thirty-five hundred transistors and used eighteen pins. In 1973, four computers for hobbyists were on the market, all using the 8008. This was the first of a successful line of x86 Intel microprocessors that are ubiquitous even today, given that it is the architecture behind the Pentium and Pentium Pro chips.

Faggin went on to propose an 8080 chip for Intel, but it took nine months to get permission to start work on it, and he designed the 4040 as well. The 8080 would be used by the successful personal computer kit, the Altair 8800, in 1975. Faggin was promoted to manager of the research and development department in 1974 at the age of thirty-two, but he felt unsupported and in the wrong place, given that Intel's core business was memory and Faggin wanted to design microprocessors. As a result, at the end of the year, with venture capital from Exxon Enterprises, Faggin founded Zilog Corporation, the first company devoted to microprocessors, where he helped to design the Z80 microprocessor. First available in 1976, this 8-bit processor was used for the RadioShack TRS-80 personal computer and other personal computers and is still in heavy production, at approximately 40 million units per year. This was the last engineering project Faggin directed. Exxon Enterprises acquired Zilog in 1981, and that year IBM selected Intel's chip over a Zilog chip for its personal computer. Freed from Zilog, Faggin began a career as an entrepreneur so that he could participate in start-ups, when the energy and passion of a company are at their highest.

After Zilog, Faggin founded companies that sought to improve the human-computer interface. The first was Cygnet Technologies, which would design intelligent voice and data devices that would accompany a personal computer. In 1986, Faggin cofounded Synaptics, Inc., with California Institute of Technology professor Carver A. Mead, hoping that they could devise a way to imprint the pattern of a neural network on a microchip. Synaptics soon moved to developing touch, sound, and sight computer interfaces, notably creating the first touchpad for laptop computers in 1992; previously, navigation on laptops had used trackballs, which were an obstacle to a thinner laptop design. Synaptics also made the touch sensors in T-Mobile's G1 phone, the first of the “Google phones” released in October 2008. Faggin was Synaptics' CEO from 1986 to 1999, and was then chairman of the board from 1999 to 2009. From 2003 to 2008, Faggin was also the president and chief executive officer of Foveon, a developer of X₃, a three-layer image-sensor technology that captures color images without using color filters. In 2011, Faggin and his wife founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, dedicated to the study of consciousness.

Personal Life

Faggin lives with his wife, Elvia, in Los Altos Hills, California. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1978 but continues to answer the phone with the Italian greeting “Pronto” and is likely to welcome guests with wine and antipasti.

In 1988, Faggin earned an International Marconi Fellowship Award as well as the Gold Medal for Science and Technology, awarded by the president and government of Italy. In 1994, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded him the W. Wallace-McDonald Award, and in 1996, the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted Faggin for his invention of the microprocessor. In 1997, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize, Japan's highest honor for global achievement, by the Inamori Foundation. The AeA/Stanford Executive Institute Award for Outstanding Achievement by an alumnus was given to Faggin in 2003 (he had graduated from the AeA/Stanford Executive Institute in 1981). In 2006, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Patent Organization. President Barack Obama awarded Faggin, along with Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor, the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' top honor for inventors. He is also the recipient of the 2014 Enrico Fermi Prize, awarded by the Italian Physical Society.

Bibliography

Aspray, William. “The Intel 4004 Microprocessor: What Constituted Invention?” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19.3 (1997): 4–14. Print.

Faggin, Federico. “The Making of the First Microprocessor.” IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine 1.1 (2009): 8–21. Print.

Faggin, Federico. "Possibilities Are Quantum." Possibility Studies & Society, vol. 1, no. 1. DOI: 10.1177/27538699221142510. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

"Federico Faggin." IEEE Computer Society. IEEE, 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

Lee, Thomas H. “From Mechanism to Monolith: The Path to the Microprocessor.” IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine 1.1 (2009): 69–75. Print.

Mazor, Stanley. “Intel 8080 CPU Chip Development.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29.2 (2007): 70–73. Print.