Federico Faggin is an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
Faggin led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group during the first five years of Intel’s microprocessor effort. While working at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, he also created the self-aligned MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) silicon-gate technology (SGT), which made possible MOS semiconductor memory chips, CCD image sensors, and the microprocessor. After the 4004, he led development of the Intel 8008 and 8080, using his SGT methodology for random logic chip design, which was essential to the creation of early Intel microprocessors. He was co-founder (with Ralph Ungermann) and CEO of Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, and led the development of the Zilog Z80 and Z8 processors. He was later the co-founder and CEO of Cygnet Technologies, and then Synaptics.
In the book Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature, Federico Faggin proposed a theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a purely quantum phenomenon, unique to each of us. This theory is supported by two quantum physics theorems: the no-cloning theorem and Holevo’s theorem.
