FEDERICO FAGGIN (1941 - Present)
Federico Faggin was born in 1941 to an Italian family in Vicenza, Italy. As he grew, he realized that he wanted to attend a technical high school and, soon after his graduation, he went to work for the Olivetti in Borgolombardo, Italy, where he found his gift for digital technology and designed his first computer at age 19. After this, he attended the University in Padua, where he earned his doctorate in 1965. During that same year he joined the faculty at the University and became an assistant professor before he took the job of senior engineer at a corporation the following year. Soon after starting work there, he left for another company in Milan. Here he created a method for the manufacturing of metal oxide semiconductor integrated circuit, which led to the design of the first commercialized products. Three years later, he left Italy for the United States where he began work on silicon gate technology.
Silicon gate technology was made to substitute aluminum control gate with the new and improved silicon since the silicon gates were faster and were more efficient in the energy aspect, and consumed less space to function. These were first available commercially in 1968, and today more than 90% of the gates used are silicon gates. In the year 1970, Faggin moved to a new company called Intel and was very excited to begin working on circuits once more. The founders of the company, Noyce and Moore, assigned him as the head of the designing circuits for Japanese calculators. While he was designing these products, he and a couple of colleagues envisioned a single chip that performed the same functions that many chips had done previously. When they designed and manufactured the chip, it became the first microprocessor ever. In 1974, Faggin codesigned the Z80 microprocessor which sold more than one billion chips.
In 1988, Faggin was awarded the Marconi Foundation Fellowship which was said to be for “his pioneering contributions to the implementation of the microprocessor, a principle building block of telecommunications”. That same year, he was also awarded the Gold Medal for Science and Technology by the President of the government of Italy. In 1994 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award for his work in silicon gate technology and microprocessors and in 1996, Faggin was inducted in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame for the co-invention of the microprocessor. He is still alive to this day.
Silicon gate technology was made to substitute aluminum control gate with the new and improved silicon since the silicon gates were faster and were more efficient in the energy aspect, and consumed less space to function. These were first available commercially in 1968, and today more than 90% of the gates used are silicon gates. In the year 1970, Faggin moved to a new company called Intel and was very excited to begin working on circuits once more. The founders of the company, Noyce and Moore, assigned him as the head of the designing circuits for Japanese calculators. While he was designing these products, he and a couple of colleagues envisioned a single chip that performed the same functions that many chips had done previously. When they designed and manufactured the chip, it became the first microprocessor ever. In 1974, Faggin codesigned the Z80 microprocessor which sold more than one billion chips.
In 1988, Faggin was awarded the Marconi Foundation Fellowship which was said to be for “his pioneering contributions to the implementation of the microprocessor, a principle building block of telecommunications”. That same year, he was also awarded the Gold Medal for Science and Technology by the President of the government of Italy. In 1994 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award for his work in silicon gate technology and microprocessors and in 1996, Faggin was inducted in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame for the co-invention of the microprocessor. He is still alive to this day.