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

Rochester, New York Rochester is a city in and the county seat, seat of government of Monroe County, New York, United States. It is the List of municipalities in New York, fourth-most populous city and 10th most-populated municipality in New York, with a populati ...

) is one of the inventors of the

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

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 university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

in 1958. He applied for his first two patents based on work done for the General Railway Signal Corp. of Rochester, New York during the summers of his undergraduate study. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to enroll in

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he received his

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate 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 prac ...

in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Hoff co-invented the least mean squares filter and the ADALINE neural network with Bernard Widrow. Hoff joined

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in 1968 as employee number 12 as "manager of applications research", 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 was part of the 4 chip MCS-4 micro computer set, released by the Intel, Intel Corporation in November 1971; the 4004 being part of the first commercially marketed microprocessor chipset, and the first in a long line of List of I ...

—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-American 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 desig ...

, who also led the project during 1970-1971. Masatoshi Shima from Busicom defined the logic. In 1975 he started a group to work on

large-scale integration An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

for use in the telephone industry, resulting in various commercial products: first commercial monolithic telephone (named "CODEC"), first commercial switched-capacitor filter (for use with CODEC), a microprocessor for real-time digitizing analog signals ( Intel 2920), and

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

hardware. 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 holding company Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) and its focus is on "video games, consumer hardware, licensing and bl ...

. After the

video game crash of 1983 The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturatio ...

, Atari was sold in 1984, and Hoff became an independent consultant. He then joined Teklicon in 1986 as an agent, and since 1990 as an employee.

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 {{Refimprove, 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 - Ge ...

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 b ...

in 1980, and the Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit in 1996. Hoff was awarded the Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum in 1997. 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 was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...

. He was made a Fellow of the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

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