Marcian Hoff

Marcian Edward Ted Hoff (Rochester, New York, October 28, 1937) is the co-inventor of the microprocessor who had the architectural idea in 1969 for the integrated circuits. He joined Intel in 1968.

The idea that this young electronic engineer had was brilliant, changing the paradigm that until then had on the development of electronic circuits. Ted had been assigned to a project to produce a connector for twelve microchips for a new electronic calculator to be launched by the Japanese company Busicom. Each of the chips, required by the aforementioned machine, should have a different function. That was the type of design architecture that had been commonly used for this type of electronic device: a chip would carry out the calculations; another would control the keypad and another would display the digits on the screen. It was a very complex and delicate task: some of the integrated circuits contained more than 5,000 transistors and all of them had to fit with absolute precision inside the calculator device.

When Hoff appraised the work to be carried out, it was feared that the total cost of the connector for the ICs needed would exceed Busicom's budget. So Ted departed from the client's original plan and adopted a completely different design approach: Instead of trying to build a dozen specialized chips into the calculator, he decided to create a single chip that had different functionalities. In reality, this new device would be a central processing unit, but it could perform different functions, due to the necessary requirements for the device where it was to be installed.

Two years later, Ted Hoff's idea came to fruition when Federico Faggin led the MCS-4 project, from April 1970 to June 1971, contributing his innovative design that made possible the integration of the 4004 on a single chip, and Intel unveiled its 4004 semiconductor, which was the world's first microprocessor, in 1971.