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

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located in W ...

) 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 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, 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. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

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. 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 seri ...

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 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 c ...

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. 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 division ...

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 The Regeneron Science Talent Search, known for its first 57 years as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and then as the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS) from 1998 through 2016, is a research-based science competition in the United Sta ...

) 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 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, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

. He was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum 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