Federico Faggin

Federico Faggin is an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004; he led the 4004 project and the design group during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. While at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 he created the self-aligned MOS silicon-gate technology, which made possible MOS semiconductor memory chips, CCD image sensors and the microprocessor, and after the 4004 he led development of the Intel 8008 and 8080 using the same methodology. He co-founded and served as chief executive of Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, leading development of the Zilog Z80 and Z8 processors, and later co-founded Cygnet Technologies and then Synaptics; in 2010 he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.