Federico Faggin

His father spent a scholar's life on Plotinus, translating the Enneads into Italian with commentary, and the son went to a technical high school in Vicenza instead. Olivetti hired him at 19, and by 1960 he had helped design and build a small transistor computer with four thousand twelve-bit words of magnetic memory. He then took a physics degree at Padua, summa cum laude, on flying-spot scanners, joined the Italian arm of Fairchild in 1967, and in February 1968 was posted to Palo Alto. Within months he had worked out the self-aligned silicon-gate process there and used it to make the Fairchild 3708, the first commercial integrated circuit built that way. He was 26. Everything after depended on it.

Intel hired him in April 1970 to build a calculator chipset for a Japanese firm called Busicom. Ted Hoff had sketched an architecture with Stan Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima, but none of the three was a chip designer and none knew silicon gate, which was the missing piece. Faggin ran the silicon in a separate department and had the design done in January 1971 — 2,300 transistors, and his initials etched into one corner of the die. Intel announced the 4004 on November 15, 1971, after he built a tester using the chip itself to persuade Bob Noyce to buy back the exclusivity Busicom held. The 8008 and 8080 followed. He left at the end of 1974, started Zilog, designed the Z80, and in 1986 founded Synaptics, which gave the laptop its touchpad.

The man who put the computer on a chip has spent his later life arguing that no computer will wake up. The question came out of Synaptics, where building artificial neural networks led him to ask whether a conscious machine was possible. He decided it was not. In 2011 he and his wife Elvia set up a foundation to fund academic study of consciousness, endowed a chair at Santa Cruz in 2015, and in 2024 he published Irreducible, which argues that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, unique to each person and impossible to copy, since a pure quantum state cannot be duplicated. Whether the physics carries the philosophy is not settled. Neither, quite, is authorship of the 4004: the prizes have gone out in twos, threes and fours — to Faggin with Hoff, with Mazor, with Shima — since 1996.

The chip he signed is a museum object now, and the one he designed next stayed on sale for almost half a century — Zilog stopped selling the Z80 as a standalone part in 2024, 48 years after it shipped, having spent the interval inside home computers, arcade cabinets and handheld games. Intel marked the 4004's 25th birthday in 1996 by handing its American employees a brass clock with one embedded in it. The honors arrived in company: the National Inventors Hall of Fame with Hoff and Mazor in 1996, the Kyoto Prize with Hoff, Mazor and Shima in 1997, the National Medal of Technology in his own name in 2010, and a knighthood from the Italian republic in 2019.

Federico Faggin's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Fairchild 3708 invention
  The first commercial chip made with self-aligned silicon-gate technology 1968
• Intel 4004 invention
  2,300 transistors, announced November 15, 1971, with F.F. in a corner of the die 1971
• Intel 8080 invention
  The chip that carried the design methodology into general computing 1974
• Zilog Z80 invention
  Software-compatible with the 8080, cheaper and faster, and sold until 2024 1976
• Synaptics touchpad invention
  It replaced the trackball on laptops and led to the touchscreen 1994
• Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature book
  His quantum account of why a machine cannot be conscious 2024

• 1960 aged ~19 At 19, helps design a small transistor computer at Olivetti
• 1965 aged ~24 Takes a physics degree summa cum laude at Padua
• February 1968 aged 26 Transfers from the Italian Fairchild operation to Palo Alto Within the year he had the silicon-gate process working.
• April 1970 aged 28 Joins Intel and takes over the stalled Busicom chipset
• January 1971 aged 29 Completes the 4004 design The first fully working part was delivered to Busicom in March.
• November 15, 1971 aged 29 Intel announces the 4004 in Electronic News
• November 1974 aged 32 Leaves Intel and founds Zilog with Ralph Ungermann Exxon's computing division put up the backing and owned the company by 1980.
• 1986 aged ~45 Co-founds Synaptics and turns to artificial neural networks The work led him to the question of whether a machine could be conscious.
• 2011 aged ~70 Founds the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation It funds academic research on consciousness.

• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. persuaded him to free the 4004
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. the other line to the integrated circuit
• Steve Wozniak b. 1950
  Co-founder of Apple who designed the Apple I and Apple II computers, sparking the personal computer revolution. built on the microprocessor
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. ran Intel while he built the 4004
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. the older American argument about consciousness