Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. (born October 28, 1937 in

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...

) is one of the inventors of the

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

Education and work history

Hoff received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...

in 1958. He applied for his first two patents based on work done for the

General Railway Signal General Railway Signal Company (GRS) was an American manufacturing company located in the Rochester, New York area. GRS was focused on railway signaling equipment, systems and services. The company was established in 1904 and became part of Alsto ...

Corp. of Rochester, New York during the summers of his undergraduate study. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to enroll in

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

, where he received his

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Hoff co-invented the

least mean squares filter Least mean squares (LMS) algorithms are a class of adaptive filter used to mimic a desired filter by finding the filter coefficients that relate to producing the least mean square of the error signal (difference between the desired and the actual ...

with

Bernard Widrow Bernard Widrow (born December 24, 1929) is a U.S. professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the co-inventor of the Widrow–Hoff least mean squares filter (LMS) adaptive algorithm with his then doctoral student Ted Hoff. ...

. Hoff joined

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

in 1968 as employee number 12, and is credited with coming up with the idea of using a "universal processor" rather than a variety of custom-designed circuits in the architectural idea and an instruction set formulated with

Stanley Mazor Stanley Mazor is an American microelectronics engineer who was born on 22 October 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He is one of the co-inventors of the world's first microprocessor architecture, the Intel 4004, together with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi S ...

in 1969 for the

Intel 4004 The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. Sold for US$60, it was the first commercially produced microprocessor, and the first in a long line of Intel CPUs. The 4004 was the first significa ...

—the chip that started the

revolution in the early 1970s. Development of the silicon-gate design methodology and the actual chip design was done by

Federico Faggin Federico Faggin (, ; born 1 December 1941) is an Italian physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. He led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group d ...

, who also led the project during 1970-1971.

Masatoshi Shima is a Japanese electronics engineer. He was one of the architects of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. In 1968, Shima worked for Busicom in Japan, and did the logic design for a specialized CPU to be translated into three-chip ...

from Busicom defined the logic. In 1980, Hoff was named the first Intel Fellow, which is the highest technical position in the company. He stayed in that position until 1983 when he left for

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, Ca ...

. He remained with Atari until March 1995. In 1996 he became executive vice president of sales and marketing for

Sega of America is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, respectively. Its divis ...

Popular culture

Hoff was featured in an Intel advertisement, calling him the "rock star" of Intel and comparing him to the rock stars of American culture.

Awards

In 1954, he was one of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now Intel STS) finalists. He was awarded the

Stuart Ballantine Medal {{notability, date=February 2018 The Stuart Ballantine Medal was a science and engineering award presented by the Franklin Institute, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. It was named after the US inventor Stuart Ballantine. Laureates *1947 - Geo ...

in 1979, the

IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award The IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award is an award is presented for outstanding contributions to nanotechnology and miniaturization in the electronics arts. It may be presented to an individual or a team of up to three. The award was established in 1975 by ...

in 1980, and the Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit in 1996. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1996 and received the

National Medal of Technology and Innovation The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...

in 2009 from President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...

. He was made a Fellow of the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...

in 2009 "for his work as part of the team that developed the

, the world's first commercial microprocessor." He received the 2011 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoff, Marcian 1937 births Living people Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni People from Rochester, New York Stanford University School of Engineering alumni 20th-century American inventors 21st-century American inventors American electronics engineers Computer hardware engineers Intel people Engineers from New York (state) Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology