Federico Faggin

After high school, Federico Faggin (b. 1941) took a job at Olivetti, Italy, where he co-designed and led the implementation of a small transistor-based computer. After obtaining his university degree, he worked at SGS Fairchild in Italy, where he developed SGS's first MOS process technology and designed its first integrated circuits. In 1968, he moved to Palo Alto and worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, where he created the MOS silicon gate technology, the basis of all modern CMOS computer chips, and designed the 3708, the world's first commercial circuit using self-aligned silicon gate technology. In 1970, he joined Intel where Hoff, Mazor and Intel's customer Masatoshi Shima had formulated a new architecture for a family of Busicom calculators. Faggin was hired as project leader to implement this architecture and created a new method for random logic chip design using silicon gate technology. He designed and developed all four chips of the 4004 family (MCS-4) with help from Shima. Faggin also conceived and architected the 4040 and the 8080 microprocessors and supervised the design of all the early Intel microprocessors (4004, 8008, 4040 and 8080). Faggin left Intel at the end of 1974 to found Zilog with Ralph Ungermann. At Zilog, he conceived and architected the Z80 microprocessor and directed its development. He was Zilog's President and CEO from inception until the end of 1980. In 1986, he co-founded and was CEO of Synaptics, a company which produces the most widely used touchpad and touchscreens in the industry. He was also President and CEO of Foveon Inc., a company making image sensors with a novel technology, from 2003 until the company was acquired in 2008. Faggin has been an angel investor since the early '80s and has served in the Board of Directors of more than two dozen startup companies in the high technology field.