1941-

Italian-born American physicist and computer designer who, with Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor, created the first microprocessor. He developed the original silicon gate technology while at Fairchild Semiconductor. He then moved to Intel in 1970 to work on the 4004 microprocessor, improving Hoff's design architecture with Mazor. Faggin founded Zilog, Inc. in 1974, which produced the Z80 microprocessor, an early rival to Intel's 8080. He co-founded Synaptics in 1986 to develop neural-net chip technology.