[Start of Tape: 0:00 - House tour omitted. Approximately 3 minutes.]

[Start of Interview: 3:12]

RW: This is Rob Walker. We're here today with Federico Faggin. Thanks for having us... doing this interview.

FF: Thank you.

RW: So you designed your first computer at 19, can you tell us about that?

FF: Yes. I had... I finished technical high school when I was eighteen years old and I was hired by Olivetti in Borgolombardo, near Milano, in Italy, to a... as a technician. Actually, "assistant engineer," I think was the title. I went through some training, about two months worth of schooling at Olivetti to learn about transistors and digital electronics and so on, advanced digital electronics because what I had at school was, sort of, lower level. And then I took on the job of another engineer that was leaving and this engineer was building a small computer and my job was to continue his work.

And basically I ended up learning on the job, my boss was teaching me a bit, and over the course of a year I was able to not only to build the thing but also to do most of the design. In this first computer was a computer with 4,000 bytes of memory and it was a big rack of electronics with many printed circuit boards. As a matter of fact, I have one of the printer circuit boards that we were using in those days. [Holding circuit board]. This is two flip-flops and it has four transistors and all discrete components. And my computer had something like several hundred of these boards in it. Of course, the function of that computer now is in one chip... actually not now, now it's in a corner of one chip.

RW: It's a cell.

FF: That's right. It's a little cell. But this was my first acquaintance with computers and then I went back to university. I went to Padua, University of Padua, and I studied physics because I wanted to really learn more about mathematics and basic physics. I felt that that grounding would be much more useful to me than doing more engineering. And so I did that and then I went back to work again.

RW: Well, now when did you go to Fairchild?

FF: Ah, Fairchild was in ... was in early `68. But before that I was working in Italy for SGS/Fairchild. Which was partly owned by Fairchild. That's, in fact, how I got in this country. I got here because I was sent here for supposedly a period of six months and thirty-six years later, I'm still here. Ah, and the... at SGS/Fairchild, I worked on MOS technology. I basically developed their first MOS process technology, manufacturing process technology, in '67. And I designed two commercial circuits for SGS and then they sent me over here to come at Fairchild R&D as an exchange program and one of the engineers of Fairchild went to Milan, Des Vigell, you probably remember him. He used to be an engineer working in the physics department in R&D of Fairchild.

So we had this exchange program and I started in February, as a matter of fact, working in Palo Alto, not too far from my home now.

RW: Yes, I was over there. I started at R&D in 1966 doing ASICs, what we call ASICs, but when you think about the work that came out of Fairchild R&D... is the seminal work...

FF: Oh, absolutely.

RW: ... of the industry today.

FF: That was the company to beat and certainly, you know, the prime was probably in the mid-60's, but even in `68 it was still the company to beat. I was really very happy to be here, I was happy to be in this area and, in fact, I just had married six months before so we were really, really very happy to be free from, you know, parents and... we were both very young and in love and we were just, you know, having a ball here.

RW: Well now, you developed the silicon gate, the first practical...

FF: Yes.

RW: ...usable silicon gate process.

FF: That's correct. Yeah, that was the first project. In fact, when I joined the lab, I was given the choice of two things to do. One was a circuit design, a shift register using metal-gate technology. I think it was a hundred or two-hundred bit shift register. And the other alternative that I had was to develop a process technology using polysilicon as the gate electrode of the transistors. And I recognized immediately the advantages of using polysilicon and I decided... I picked that one, even if my heart was leaning more and more, even in those days, toward design.

And so, so I picked that and Tom Klein had done some prior work to show that, in fact, the work function between the polysilicon and silicon would work out in such a way that the threshold voltage would be lower, which was a big advantage in those days because we could not control Qss as well as we can today. But there was there was no way of doing it... in fact, even etching polysilicon... it was not understood how to do it. And so I started from scratch. I started from the basic idea that how, you know, how could one make an integrated circuit using polysilicon. I developed the basic architectural process. I started doing the... I developed the etching solution for etching reliably polysilicon and, using some existing test patterns that were there, showed that, in fact, we could produce workable transistors within a few months... then we started it.

I also invented the buried... what is called the buried contact, which is the polysilicon to silicon contact which was, in fact, later on was the one that allowed us to make the microprocessor so quickly, so soon. Because it would allow to have much more dense circuitry than was possible with metal gate. So, by April we had the basic process technology worked out and then I designed the first integrated circuit to use the silicon gate technology, which was the 3708. It was an 8-bit analog multiplexer using decoding logic. It was housed in a 16-pin package and it was a product that was particularly difficult to do in manufacturing. There was already a product called the 3705, it was in the catalog of products of Fairchild. It was sold mostly to military applications.

And because the "on" resistance of these transistors had to be very low, they had to be fast, and the leakage had to be extremely low. It was very difficult to make and so we picked that device as a test bed for the technology and eventually, in `69, we were in production with that in the lab so that became the first, the first commercial silicon-gate technology product, integrated circuit.

RW: And today, essentially every integrated circuit use silicon gate.

FF: Today, it's basically 90% of all semiconductors use silicon-gate technology, derivatives, of course, of silicon-gate technology. About $90 billion last year worth of business.

RW: Now did you get a patent on that?

FF: Yes. Tom Klein and I got a patent on that. I don't really know how... see the idea... the basic idea was, I think, Hughes and then AT&T had done some work also, although nobody has really been able to make workable circuits with that idea. I didn't know anything of that. In fact, I was... I found out later that there had been some prior work and when I joined the labs I was told, "Hey, why don't you, you know, why don't you do a process using polysilicon," and then that's all... and then I started from that basic information, with no more information than that. So I found out later there was some prior art but nobody had really been able to do it, to do it right, to do it, you know, in a workable manner, and it's really this... it's the difference between an idea and something that works.

RW: Had Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce started Intel yet?

FF: No, no. They started, they started as a matter of fact, after I had proven that it was working... we had the 3708 was, you know... came out already and basically they knew that the technology was working. In fact, I suspected they were going to use silicon-gate technology at Intel and I told... I told Bob Sees [?] I remember, in those days, I said, "Hey, I had a hunch they were going to use silicon-gate technology." And Bob Sees said, "Well, if they do that we're going to sue them."

RW: Which they didn't do.

FF: Yeah, which they didn't do but I remember that I was a boy from Italy, I didn't understand the ways of the States, so suing was something very strange for me in those days.

[Laughs.]

RW: Well I went to an IEEE meeting after Intel was a little over a year old where Andy Grove was talking about their products. And he made the statement that this proved you could move a process from Palo Alto to Mountain View in less than a year! Which was always what we spoke about...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ... from Fairchild R&D in Palo Alto to Fairchild production in Mountain View but he was referring to Intel...

FF: ...to Mountain View Intel...

RW: ... in Mountain View. So I think it was pretty clear that they did take some intellectual property.

FF: Oh absolutely. There's no question about that. Of course, you know, the... now Intel would sue you if you even whiffed something... but in the origin of Intel, I mean, it's very clear that the silicon-gate technology, where it came from... and there's no question about that. As a matter of fact, later on when Des patented the idea of polysilicon to silicon contact--which was my idea at Fairchild--and I found out in `74 that he actually had patented that idea as Intel. [Laughs.]

RW: But then... so you decided rather than fight `em, to join `em, so in 1970 you went to Intel.

FF: Yeah, in 1970 I decided that I had enough of Fairchild. With Noyce and Moore leaving, the new management team coming in, Fairchild was beginning to really have a slow but steady decline. And also my interest was more toward... toward design and I was, you know, getting less and less interested in process technology, although I managed to develop in `69, n-channel polysilicon devices. I also developed bipolar and MOS in a single... what now is called BiCMOS... we had... I had early BiCMOS devices built in those days, just the beginning of it.

And I also managed to make thin-film transistors using polysilicon material and so... I ... it was a very... particularly creative period of my time and I enjoyed Fairchild Labs but it was time for me to move on.

And so I went to my old boss, which was Vadez, he was my boss at Fairchild as well and he had joined Intel in, basically soon after the... Intel was founded, and I called him up and I asked him if he had a job for me because I wanted to develop in silicon-gate. Fairchild was... was very... you know, still did not have a good silicon-gate technology in production that I could use and so I decided to leave.

And Vadez... Vadez hired me and my first job was to design the first microprocessor.

RW: Yeah, you were doing the circuit design and Ted Hoff did the architecture and...

FF: Ted Hoff did the architecture and I did everything else. The logic circuit, the whole... and also finish off the architecture because the architecture had still some few... few things that were not.... that were not... you know, it was not possibly complete... but it was 95% done.

So when I picked up the project--I did not work for Ted Hoff, I worked for Vadez and Ted Hoff used, in those days to work for Gordon Moore, he was application research.

RW: Right.

FF: So Ted Hoff's job was finished with basically having developed, having proposed the architecture of the 4000 family--what became known as the 4000 family--in those days, it was called the "BUSICOM set," the "BUSICOM chipset." I mean there was a... there was the... you know, it had no names yet, when I joined Intel. But after having finished the proposal... after having proposed the idea and working with Te... with Matsotoshi Shima which was the engineer from BUSICOM, and also working with Stan Mazur, they had developed the basic architecture of the family and my job was to make it real.

When I got in, there was actually much less done than Vadez had told me. I mean Vadez told me that, you know, I mean, pretty much had the... you know, the design... the basic design was done and, you know, what I had to do was to finish it up and, you know, do the layout and do this thing, you know.

When I got in, there was nothing. I mean, there wasn't any structure... there were a few pages of, you know, a description of the thing with the instruction set and a block diagram and that was it. That was all I got and then I was on my own.
[Laughs.]

And I was already late six months on the project because for six months they had not been doing anything.

RW: Well they, they didn't have a circuit designer.

FF: No, they didn't have anybody to do... nor a logic designer. I mean the logic design wasn't done.

RW: Well, Intel was at that time was a memory company...

FF: ...it was a memory company. Yeah. So, in fact, I still remember that as I got in, Stan Mazur--Ted Hoff was away--and Mazur gave me the specification and then he gave a bunch of... sort of random schematics which proved to be totally useless later on. But, you now, that's what he gave me.

So I started reading this thing and then he told me that the next day, Shima would come from Japan to check the work that had been done during the last six months.

RW: [Laughs.]

FF: So I went to pick up Shima at the airport with Stan Mazur and Shima, you know, was, of course, the customer and in a sort of broken English was saying, "I came here to check. I'm here to check."

So fine. So when eventually we got into the lab, I...he says, "What... where is the, you know... what have you done?" I said, "Well, I came here yesterday. I haven't done anything."

"You haven`t done anything?!" You know, he was really mad at me. I said, "I showed you what I had."

And he said, "I already seen this. This is just idea. I came here to check. There's nothing to check."

[Laughter.]

And he was really pissed. And it took me at least a week to calm him down. I mean, he was absolutely beside himself because basically six months had gone by and no work had been done. They had been promised the chipset a year from six months before, so now we were already six months late. And Shima was irate toward me because I was the man in charge and so, you know, so I was obviously the culprit, and how come I have done that to them and it was... you know, I could not get it through his head that I had been hired the day before, you know. So that was really hilarious, sort of, and eventually I calmed him down and I said, "Hey look, if you help me, we'll get done sooner. If you want to bitch, bitch, you know, but if you help me we get it done," and, in fact, he had been quite helpful throughout the process of designing the whole thing, checking in particular that things would work in his calculator, which I have here--I will show you later--and... so that ended up being quite a bit of help for me because I was by myself.

And basically, I was supposed to do four chips in six months... by myself.

RW: Without computer aided design...

FF: Of course, without computer aided design. But I had good pencils with lots of lead. [Laughs.]

RW: Well, the ah... why don't you... you have a photograph there of the 4004...

FF: Yeah, well the... you know, maybe... let me say a few words about the BUSICOM project because it needs to be seen in that context. The BUSICOM project had four chips, one of which was the first microprocessor, the 4004. There was the 4001, 4002, 4003, 4004. The 4001 was a ROM with I/O and it was a 2,000 bit ROM which was, in those days, was really pushing it because also there was a lot of I/O--input/output--electronics around it. There was... there was programmable both... both by.. at mask time as well as by the nature in which it was designed.

Then there was the 4002 which a 320-bit RAM plus output. There was no input in that case, only output... output registers. And then the 4003, which was a shift-register. It was a 10-bit shift-register, serial-in, parallel-out, static shift register so that was a... it was a very simple chip.

And then the 4004, which was a CPU. And the CPU with the instruction set was sort of tailored for calculator applications because that was the intention in those days, was to apply this chipset to make a variety of calculators for BUSICOM. It was an exclusive contract for BUSICOM so it could only... BUSICOM was the only customer. And here's the result of the effort [holding up photomicrograph of 4004 die]. This is the world's first microprocessor. It's a chip roughly 136 square mils, 136 x 136... it's actually... it's not a square but it turns out to be about 136 square equivalent area.

And it has about 2,300 transistors and you can see here the registers, general purpose registers. This is stack for the addresses, the address counter is over here. The instruction decoder is here, all the...there's control logic all around here and all around here. The timing is over... timing is... let me look at my... yeah, the timing is on this side, and this is the arithmetic and logic unit. So this is... this whole thing, ten years ago, required something like several hundred of these boards to be made and so this is the progress in ten years.

And, of course, in real size, here is the first microprocessor [holding IC chip]. It's inside here, the package is shown here... 16-pin...and that's, in those days, 16-pins was religion at Intel. There was, in fact, I wanted to use more pins than sixteen because it would have been faster, but... we lost a lot of performance by limiting the architecture to only 16-pins. We had to multiplex, on 4 bits, address and data... and wasting it all the time... so we wasted about a factor of three in performance in those days by a silly decision to go to 16-pins.

In fact, it took me a long time to convince my boss and, in general, Intel management, to go to 40 pins for the 8080. The 8080 was my idea, the architecture, and that was one of the major battles that I had to fight to get Intel to agree that 40 pins was an acceptable package size. At any rate, this is it. This is the first microprocessor. It used to run at 750MHz [kHz] using p-channel technology so there were two power supplies, +5 and -12. And...

RW: Not 750MHz. You mean "kilohertz."

FF: Not 750MHz or 75MHz... it was probably... the equivalent would be more like 75 MHz because, in fact, this device could run a little fast... you know, could run more like 1.2MHz, but because it was only for one customer, we didn't want to lose any distribution... we were selling 750kHz... everything that was functional.

So that corresponds to between 75 and 120MHz of today...

RW: Oh, I see.

FF: So there's about a factor of a hundred in performance between 1970 which is this time, and 1995.

RW: Now, I remember prior to even Intel being formed that at Fairchild we were working on a similar design, a four-bit processor...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ...that would be used for a calculator...

FF: Yes...

RW: In fact, Hewlett-Packard was going to be the customer...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ...and... but we could never make the damn thing until... we eventually did and it came out as the "PPS-25," but then that was several years after the 4004...

FF: Yeah.

RW: But we were just limited to how much we could... how many transistors we could get on a chip.

FF: That's correct.

RW: And so, Intel had the hottest process around at that time and so I guess the confluence of the technology really drove the ability to put a computer on a chip...

FF: Sure... oh absolutely...

RW: It had been a dream.

FF: Absolutely. I mean, the idea of a CPU on a chip was around since the mid-sixties. When people realize that every few years you could take something that was in a board like this and make it into a chip like this, and then you put many of those in a board, and then a few years later, it's one other chip like this. You know, it didn't take much of that to go on before people realized, "Hey, you know, a CPU that requires many boards one day is going to be in one chip." So the idea of CPU on chip had been advanced since the early sixties and was talked about in the mid-sixties, so it was really a question of when the process technology would be mature enough that you could put enough transistors in a chip that were sufficient to create a CPU.

Well, in 1970, the technology to make microprocessors was really available only at Intel because Intel had developed the... they had silicon-gate and silicon-gate was the only way to do it in those days. To do it effectively... cost effectively... because the whole idea was "let's make this thing at a cost at which, you know, people are going to use it. If it costs too much, people are going to use the old ways."

So the basic difficulty in those days to have microprocessors was having a process technology that could actually do it. And then doing it. In other words, designing it, designing in cost... in a matter that was economical so that, again, the minimum number of transistors would be used to get the function done. And then producing it. So that is the task that I performed at Intel, which was reduce an architecture that was done by Ted Hoff, into practice... and make it work.

And that was a job that took about eleven months of real hard work. I mean, I worked anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day, partly because we were, as I mentioned earlier, we were late before starting. Of course, I got back the schedule to where it would take a year to get it done. Actually, no, I got it back to where it would take nine months to get it done, so I already lost three of the six months and then it took two months longer than... than we.. than the customer really wanted.

Certainly, I wanted to have a year. Because four chips done by hand in those days was a tall order... to do that in less than a year.

So anyway, so that's the story behind... I want to show you here the first product that used the first microprocessor. And this is a calculator... this is the engineering prototype than BUSICOM used to debug their product and you can see here--this is the printer by the way, it's a Seiko printer, drum printer--you can see here, if I can do this without breaking anything, you can see here the PC [printed circuit] board, it contains the 4000 family here. Let me take a look... those are the shift-registers, by the way, they were driving... providing the signals for the hammers of the printer and this is the... some transistor drivers for the... for the printer. And that was the only sort of non-integrated portion of the calculator, the rest of it was all done with LSI and the 4004 is this one. There were... there was one 4002 here, another one here and the rest of them were 4001s, which are the ROMs. So the program was contained in this ROM, one, two, three, four, and five over here... so five ROMs, two RAM chips, and one CPU and three shift-registers was all that was needed to do a... what in those days, was a high-end printing calculator. Of course, now everything else...

RW: Of course, today it's now one chip and it sells for less than a dollar.

FF: Today, yeah. All this electronics is in a very small chip that, yes, sells for less than a dollar. So this is the... but in those days, this was a major step forward. Although calculators were built routinely using custom integrated circuits so, in fact, what we provided to BUSICOM in those days was the opportunity to create, fast, a number of calculators using the same components so they real value of the 4000 family in those days was not that it could do something that could not be done before--as a matter of fact, that calculator was a little more expensive than if you had done custom circuits...

RW: Yes.

FF: ...but you could have the next calculator done faster and, in fact, over the... the life... there was a short life of the company, the company went bankrupt... but over the two years from '70 to '72, before the... before BUSICOM went bankrupt, they had designed a number of calculators and a number of other products using the 4000 family.

RW: But because it's programmable, it could be used as a controller, it could be used as anything.

FF: Of course, yeah, but in those days though, Intel believed that--and Ted Hoff in particular believed that-- the 4004 was really only good for calculators. In fact, I was the one that really pushed Intel to go into the market with the 4000 family. The.. Hoff believed that the 8008, which as the first 8-bit microprocessor that Intel did, was very good for, you know, a bunch of applications and so on, and certainly was behind that, but as far as the 4004 and the family, he really was not... believed that is was only good for calculators. And I really wanted that product to be on the market and so I really pushed Intel management.

The first thing that I did was I developed a tester. It tested for the 4004 as a matter of fact, and I used the 4004 as the controller of the tester and so I could show, "Look, you know, this is not a calculator, right? I mean, you know, I'm using the 4004 to do a control function for the tester and it's doing the job and it's doing the job well." And that certainly got into the ears of Noyce and certainly that was an important event because it turned their minds toward the potential of the 4000 family.

And then I also pushed Noyce to get released from the exclusive agreement that they had with BUSICOM because in those days, BUSICOM was the only company that could use the 4000 family. And so I was in contact with Shima and I knew that they really were hurting because of the cost they were paying for the chipset to Intel and the company was not doing very well. And I realized that if Intel was to give a price break to BUSICOM, they would have a chance to get released, you know, from the exclusivity. And I proposed that to Noyce when I found out that he was going to Japan to visit BUSICOM. Noyce apparently agreed and they negotiated, he and Ed Gelbach negotiated a deal, where basically BUSICOM released Intel from the exclusivity. So that set the stage for announcing that year... toward... in November of `71, announcing the 4000 family. So that's how that happened.

Then of course, after that happened, everybody agreed that it was their idea anyway. [Laughs] Because that's the way it works. When something works, everybody thought of it. But, in fact, very early, in... early '71, Intel cites the 8008 as the first microprocessor and, as you know, that was the Datapoint engine, that's another piece of evidence that shows that people were thinking in terms of CPU on a chip even, you know, even outside of Intel. In other words, the 8008 was the architecture of CTC--Computer Terminal Corporation--Datapoint terminal. Then later on, the company's name was changed to Datapoint.

And it was basically a CPU that was supposed to be done using as few as possible MOS chips. And back in the late...in `69... in late '69, CTC had visited Intel and Ted Hoff had seen that that architecture was... you know, could actually fit in the chip and so he proposed a single-chip solution for CTC and that project was started... it was started with the name "1201," when I joined Intel in April of 1970, the project was already on-going and Hal Feeney was designing or beginning to design, the 1201 which, as I said, later became the 8008. It simply was renamed the 8008.

So, the... as you can see, there were already two microprocessors sort of competing for being first in the market, even at Intel in 1970. In fact, I thought when I joined Intel, that I was going to be second because, you know, Hal Feeney had to design one chip and I had four to design, so you know, guess who's going to come out first? But then later on, Hal Feeney was moved to doing something else and also the project, you know, was difficult and Ted Hoff was unable to really help Hal Feeney. And so the whole thing kind of got put on ice and then Hal Feeney was moved to work for me, helping me out with testing, test programs, the testers for the 4000 family toward the end of 1970. And then the project, the 1201 project, was resumed in January of 1971 and I was in charge of the project. Of course, Feeney was really the engineer who did all the detailed work under my supervision and I helped Feeney a lot.

In fact, having done the 4004 provided sort of the basic foundation on how to do it because it was not clear how to do random logic using silicon-gate, back in 1970. I mean, Intel had no experience with random logic and nobody had done random logic with silicon-gate. You needed to do things a bit different. For example, one of the first things that I did was to use bootstrap. You know, in those days, you probably remember, bootstraps were very important to get higher voltage and therefore more drive capability and being able to withstand more threshold voltage drop in dynamic circuits. And people thought that you couldn't do bootstraps with silicon gate without having an additional masking layer. But I had figured out a way to do it and I had understood how it could be done without that and so, I brought that technique that I had developed at Fairchild, at Intel. And that was a critical element of, you now, of design that was essential to make the 4004 work in those days, otherwise it would have been hopelessly slow.

So, anyway, that's a... that's a long story but the 8008 ended up... the 1201/8008, ended up being finished toward the end of 1971 and was introduced in early '72 and it became the second microprocessor of Intel.

RW: Yes, and that started... that coincided with Wilf shutting down my custom operation...

FF: I see!

RW: ... because people perceived that microprocessors would take over most custom and then TTL MSI [Medium Scale Integration ICs] dropped in price from about $5 to $1 a package and those two... those two items...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ... spelled the end of my custom career until I founded LSI Logic in 1980.

FF: Yes, yes... yeah... as a matter of fact, Hal Feeney went to... to see you guys...

RW: Yes, yes...

FF: ... back in early '71...

RW: Yes, he wanted to build a silicon breadboard... us to build a silicon breadboard...

FF: Well, actually he wanted... you know, the idea was to see if... if it could be done with Micro Mosaic, not to build a breadboard actually to see if it was possible to you because we had a customer that wanted it right away. Datapoint had vanished, but there was another customer... Seiko, from Japan... they wanted to make a programmable scientific calculator and they wanted to use the 8008, but they were in a hurry and so, you know...

RW: And I looked at...

FF: No but... it... it couldn't be done, I mean it was...

RW: I looked at it and I said, "No, I can't do it with standard cell."

FF: Yeah, there was no way. I mean, it was, as it turned out, the 8008 was able as far as it could go also with a year later technology because it was about 10 mils bigger on a side than the 4004 and the 4004 was already pushing it. Although today you laugh at it, you know, but in those days, 136 mil square chip was a big chip. [Laughs.]

RW: Well then, did you... were you involved in the 8080?

FF: I... that was my idea, I mean the 8080. The 8080 was an interesting story because I went to... I went to... with Hank Smith, which used to run the marketing... the first marketing of the 4000 family and the MCS-4 and the 8008, to Europe on the summer of '71, late summer of '71, presenting, in anticipation of the announcement we were going to have at the end of November to talk to key customers showing the 4004, and also talking about the 8008, that was supposed to be available in early `72.

And I visited a bunch of customers, Phillips and... Phillips and Nixdorf stand up in my mind. Particularly Nixdorf because Nixdorf was stubborn, they were particularly obnoxious to me. I mean they were just very, very... they seemed bitter that we had a microprocessor. I mean, they were really angry that, you know... and they were very critical about it, you know, "Oh, it doesn't do anything and it is bad and, you know, you should have done this way, you should have done that way."

RW: Well, it wasn't as powerful as a minicomputer of the day...

FF: Of course, of course... but there was more to it because I think that they saw that the semiconductor industry was really... with the microprocessor, was really emerging as... in a leadership position that before was the distribution of computer manufacturers like, you know, Nixdorf and Siemens and IBM and so on. So they kind of saw that and they were particularly... they were, you know, I could see there was more to it than just the fact that the 8008 wasn't a particularly good architecture, although it was OK.

On the other hand, I made treasure of some of the comments they made and so on my return from that trip, I came up with some ideas on how to make a much better microprocessor which became the 8080. And I started... I wanted to do it right away, but Des didn't want me to ... Grove and, you know, sort of the top brass at Intel felt it was too risky to start a new microprocessor when still, you know, they had not seen how the 4004 and 8008 were doing in the marketplace.

And so it took me a long time, it took me about nine months of really pushing and lobbying to finally get permission to do the 8080 which I did the architecture, the basic design structure and then I hired Shima, from Japan, to work for me to actually do the detailed work. So after Shima came toward the end of `72, I, you know, for a few months, three or four months, I taught him how to design, you know, and really help him along and then Shima took off. And Shima was very good and he was, you know, he carried the rest of the project mostly, you know, with minimal supervision, of course, I supervised him, you know, closely, but he was mostly by himself...

RW: Hm Well, the 8080 was really the breakthrough part...

FF: The 8080 was the breakthrough part. The 8080 was the microprocessor that made the industry and it did not escape the attention of Intel, in fact, they changed their phone number: the last four digits became "8080" back in `74 as a matter of fact. And, it was really the first microprocessor that broke the... the performance barrier. And a lot of that was because it was in 40 pins and it used n-channel technology instead of p-channel technology. It was a better microprocessor, of course, than the 8008 but it was compatible with the 8008, I wanted to maintain the machine code compatibility. And it had more registers... it was a basically... it was a cleanup of the... the 8008, particularly the interrupt structure was quite a bit better, because the one in the 8008 was totally useless. It was really useless.

In those days, I didn't understand interrupt structure, nor did Ted Hoff, and the old structure was really a joke in the case of the 8008. But later on, I figured out what really was needed to do an effective interrupt structure, and so the 8080 reflected that. Um, so... so the 8080 immediately was adopted by the market, immediately opened up all kinds of applications that before were only suggested by the 4004 and by the 8008. And it was just the beginning of the microprocessor revolution.

RW: I, I remember being with Gordon Moore when the... it was announced, I think National announced, that they were licensing Signetics...

FF: Hm

RW: ... with the 8080, which meant that there were something like twelve or fourteen suppliers of the 8080 and Gordon was really upset...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ... and I really think that was the start of the real protection

FF: Yes.

RW: ... attempts to really protect the architecture...

FF: Yes.

RW: ... from others.

FF: Hm ...

RW: Because everybody copied the 8080--legally.

FF: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, including the Russians I found out, many, many years later. [Laughs] But um, another thing that the 8080 did was the... it began to really create the substance behind the movement that was happening among universities and advanced industries... the movement of young people in the computer clubs, as you remember, toward the microprocessor and this microelectronics revolution that was happening. And out of that milieu, the personal computer came out, as you remember.

RW: Altair.

FF: Altair and MITS and those kind of, you know, those kind of machines that were 8080-based and that was there beginning of the revolution that we're still in...

RW: Also Microsoft, Bill Gates' first hardware...

FF: Yeah, Bill Gates first BASIC program was based on, you know... was for the 8080. So, anyway, that's it. Yeah, the 8080 was really, in a way, was at Intel was my biggest contribution from a business point of view. From a, you know, from an empowering point of view, my biggest contribution was, of course, the 4004. But the 8080 was the one that created the business.

RW: Now, were you involved with the 8086?

FF: No. I had left already to start Zilog.

RW: Were you involved with the 432?

FF: No.

RW: That was a...

FF: Those were all the Intel response to Zilog.

RW: Hm

FF: Yeah.

RW: Well, the 432, which is a 32-bit microprocessor, was to be the new architecture...

FF: Sure.

RW: ...and... was an utter failure... because it was too slow.

FF: Yes.

RW: It was much too slow and too expensive. And so I was just arriving at Intel about this time...

FF: Yup.

RW: And the 8086 then was clobbered together very quickly.

FF: Yes.

RW: And was a 16-bit 8080.

FF: Hm

RW: And it would run code...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ... and that was its strength but it was also its weakness...

FF: Yup.

RW: ... because it was perceived as, correctly, as what it was... and it still contained artifacts ...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ... from the 8008...

FF: Yup.

RW: ... as opposed to the 6800 which was a clean sheet of paper design.

FF: Yes. And, in fact, there were two instructions in the 8086 that were designed for compatibility with the 8080, which were in the initial datasheets which we then took out during Operation CRUSH to... so that people wouldn't perceive it as a simple extension... and we needed to reposition it as a leadership kind of product...

RW: Well anyway, in `74 you started Zilog?

FF: Yes.

RW: What motivated you to start a company?

FF: Well, in silicon valley, you know, you have to start a company unless your manhood is going to be questioned right? Well, seriously, the... it was not one reason, there were several reasons. Among them, I had worked very hard at Intel for about... almost five years and I had grown professionally quite a lot. In fact, by the time I left, I had eighty people in my department. I had more than half of the overall R&D of Intel, which at that point was already a large company. It was about... they were... in `74 they did about $135 million of revenues which was a lot in those days.

So, I had more than half of the R&D at Intel reporting to me. But, you know, I did not have the satisfaction that I was expecting--economical satisfaction--but not having been one of the early guys, I did not have a lot of stock and the company had, you know, a reasonable amount of stock but not very much. And the company was getting too big for my taste and it was getting a little too... Andy was beginning to become the man in charge and there were sign-up sheets where, you know, you had to sign-up if you arrive after eight o'clock, and the environment was no longer the environment that I really liked to be part of.

So I decided that it was time for me to go, time for me to leave, that I could start a company and work as hard and have a lot more satisfaction and having an environment that would be much more to my liking as opposed to having to sort of, you know, to be felt like you were subjugated there. So that's how I did it.

RW: Well, I noticed that change at Intel in the culture. It used to be that when Noyce was very active in the company, there would be a meeting and Andy Grove would start off on one of his diatribes and Noyce would say, "Andy, shut-up." And that was sort of the end of it. So he was able to hold him in check and then as Noyce semi-retired and became vice-chairman, a lot of the decency went out of the company. Because Noyce and Moore are just such... Noyce was and Moore is.. such gentlemen and such, you know, brilliant but people... wonderful people that you would just love to be around. Gordon Moore never says anything dumb. I don't know if you noticed that.

FF: Yeah.

RW: He doesn't say much but whatever he says is either very funny or...

FF: ... very cogent.

RW: ... right on the mark. He will sit through a meeting and not say anything and then he'll make, you know, one comment which just sums it right up. And I really... I really appreciated that.

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