Okay. All right. So I was born in Italy in 1941, wartime. And I grew up — I was born in a town, but then in 1943 the Allied troops were coming north from Sicily. My parents thought, properly, that it was good to go back to the small town, the village where they came from, and not very far from town, but still far enough that no bombs were thrown there. And in fact, our apartment was destroyed during a bombing in 1945. Anyway, so I lived in the countryside where basically civilization had never come. Not exactly in the village, because we had electricity and so on, but in the countryside. My uncle lived in the countryside; they had a big farm. They basically lived like you lived 200 years earlier. You know, no running water, no bathroom in the home, no electricity in the stables, things like that. So it was funny that I lived in the agricultural era for six years, and then I went back to town. Then there the industrial revolution had arrived, and then I contributed quite a bit on the third revolution, which is the informational revolution.
After I graduated from a technical high school, I worked at Olivetti in 1960 and 1961 — the entire 1961 and a few months of 1960. And as a young man, in 1961 I was 19 and turned 20 at the end of the year, in December. And I designed about 60% and I built a small electronic computer using transistors, at a time when transistors had just begun to be used for computers. Just the year before, 1959, was the first year that computers were sold using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. And Olivetti was one of the two — IBM and Olivetti in Italy were the two companies that actually built commercial computers using transistors. And transistors were built in Italy at that time, germanium transistors. And I got fascinated by transistors, how they worked, and I couldn't understand how they worked because you would have to know quantum physics to really understand how they work. So I decided to go back to school, and I studied physics at the University of Padua, graduated there with honors.
And then I worked in Italy for about a year, a couple of years, and I was in Silicon Valley in 1968, in February 1968, working for Fairchild Semiconductor. But at that time I was a guest, because Fairchild Semiconductor owned 30% of SGS-Fairchild, the company I was working for, and we had an exchange of engineers. And I was supposed to stay six months, and I stayed 57 years, because I came back last year. Now I'm back living in Italy. But in '68, the MOS technology was beginning to show promise, but there were lots of problems. In fact, in '67 I developed the first process technology for MOS at SGS-Fairchild, and also designed two circuits, two commercial circuits using MOS. So I was quite knowledgeable about how they worked and all the issues, by having done that work. So when I joined Fairchild, I designed a much better technology, the MOS silicon gate technology at Fairchild, that allowed us to solve all the problems that existed at that time.
So that technology allowed us to make all the components of a computer — the CPU, the memories, the I/O — with the same technology, which before could not be done, neither with MOS nor with bipolar technology, which was the dominant one at that time. 95% of the production used bipolar technology and could not do the job. And then I showed that you could do a CPU, the first microprocessor, working for Intel. Intel started by essentially taking the technology that I developed at Fairchild and making it theirs. When the two co-founders of Intel — they were also co-founders of Fairchild — left, they took the technology that I did to make memories. So the first dynamic memories, the DRAM, the famous 1103, was designed using my technology. It could not be done with the previous technology because the leakage current was too high. With my technology, the leakage was reduced by a factor of 500. So now you could do refresh, because you could refresh a memory every once in a while, so it would not interfere much, and you could make a very small chip to replace the core memories they had used.
So I worked at Intel. I joined Intel when they had this project and they didn't know how to do it. It was for a custom chip for a Japanese customer, and I designed a chip with a couple more ideas of mine that made it possible. In early 1971, the Japanese company called Busicom used those chips for a printing calculator. And then they applied those same chips for many other projects that they had. And their idea was — they actually had the idea to use a little programmable computer to make a bunch of different calculating products. And so Intel took even that idea and made it theirs, not mine, because it was a head-off that was credited with having invented the programmable solution, which obviously computers were programmable before and after. And the idea of using chips of that sort to make different products was actually Busicom, not Intel. But anyway, the crucial thing was actually making it, because nobody had designed a chip that complex before. I was the first one to do it.
I also did the other three microprocessors of Intel, including the 8080, which was my original idea. And the 8080 — it took me nine months to get permission to make it. The 8080 was the microprocessor that really set the new standard. The second-generation microprocessor was six times faster than the first generation, the 8008, which I also did. And so with that, I decided it was time for me to go, because we had lost nine months of the leadership we had with respect to the competition. I didn't want to repeat the problem, because it was beginning to be repeated a second time around. So I started my first company, Zilog, developed the Z80 microprocessor, the third-generation microprocessor, which became very successful and is still in volume production today, 50 years later. It was in fact introduced in March 1976.
Anyway, so my career then was as an entrepreneur. I started another company, developed the first intelligent telephone for voice and data that would combine with the personal computers, and you would have an entire environment for voice, data, and computing — really the key idea, much later, of the iPhone. Except by the time of the iPhone in 2007 — I'm talking about 1984 now — the technology had grown to the point where you could put that entire system in your pocket, which you couldn't do before. But at least I was able to get something new out of my own ideas, and that was the touchscreen. The touchscreen was an invention that I did together with four or five of our more creative engineers in my third company, called Synaptics. Synaptics started exactly 40 years ago, in 1986.
I wanted to develop neural networks using floating-gate transistors that would allow memory and computation in the same chip, and also not having to take information from memory, operate on it, and then put it back into memory, because the floating-gate devices were both the processors and the nonvolatile storage. And so during that time, together with a small team of engineers, we actually solved a number of very crucial problems, much better than AI could do at that time. And it was clear to me that the future would have been neural networks for AI, but it was too early. To do learning we needed much, much bigger computers than we had available, and much more data than we had available. I decided to change direction, and we developed the first touchpad and touchscreen. And for the touchscreen there was no market. The touchpads were immediately used in laptop computers, and they replaced the trackball. If you have gray hair, you probably remember what they were, but trackballs were a little ball that you would move with your finger to move the cursor. So it was like a mouse, a mechanical mouse but upside down, that would work — but it would work only for a while. Then you had to take it apart and clean it, because fingers are greasy, and so after a while the cursor would have a mind of its own. It would skip around the screen, and you could do nothing but clean it. So anyway, that was fun.
And then in the early 2000s, when cell phones were beginning to become intelligent, I realized that that was the right application for the touchscreen. And so for a few years we went around showing the touchscreen to Motorola, Nokia, RIM — all those companies that now are gone — showing that if you had a touchscreen, you could make a highly intelligent phone with a lot more functionality than could be done with a conventional keyboard and a very small screen. The only one that liked it was Apple, and so by I think it was 2004, 2005, they wanted to use it. They wanted exclusivity. We didn't know for what, because as you would know, Apple is very secretive. But anyway, they wanted the exclusivity, we said no, so they made their own. And well, now we had a second-source touchscreen for the competitors of Apple at that point. So anyway, that was my story essentially as an inventor and as an entrepreneur.
But in 1990, while I was studying neuroscience — I was studying biology because I was quite involved with trying to understand how the brain works, and to make effective architectures for neural networks — I asked myself a question. I said, how come that these books that talk about electrical signals, you know, biochemical signals in the brain, describe, for example, the taste of food as if the taste of food was the electrical signals that we have in the brain? And I said, this cannot be — there is something missing here. Where do you go from electrical signals, or electrochemical signals in the brain, to the experience of the food, which is the taste of the food, or the smell, or when you love someone, the love that you feel — from electrical signals? It doesn't make any sense. So I discovered what was later called the hard problem of consciousness. There was a philosopher called David Chalmers who came up with, understood the same thing, and wrote a book and made a very good case that science — that book came out in '95, and I realized it probably was '88, '89 at that point, probably '88. And I was trying to make a computer, I asked myself, well, how could I make a computer be conscious? I realized that consciousness — because at that time I thought that I was a materialist too. I was trained, of course, as a physicist, and my religious indoctrination had been abandoned, and so I...
So I thought that if the brain is like they were saying in those days — by the way, they're saying the same thing today, scientists, but in those days they were saying that the brain is like a computer. So if the brain is like a computer and consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain, then I should be able to program a computer to be conscious. So let me say, and so I said to myself, well, let me figure it out. And I couldn't. I, you know, for the, you know, I'm a physicist, so I know physics well enough [clears throat] that if there was something that I could use to, you know, to make something conscious, I would have found it. But there was nothing, you know, so it was a mystery. And at that time I was also unhappy about my life. I had reached everything that should make me happy, and I wasn't happy, and I didn't understand. So I had two good reasons to actually understand what consciousness is. One was a personal reason, the other was to understand for the, you know, to make better products. And it was in that climate that one night I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness that came spontaneously. Some that read my books claimed that I took some LSD or some other drugs, but that's not true. I only got up and took a glass of water and went back to bed. And around midnight, one night during the holiday vacations from '89 to '90, and I had, you know, while I was trying to go back to sleep again, from my chest an unbelievable energy comes out of me. It is love. But, you know, apart from the fact that, you know, it was physical energy. It was not an imagination or a thought or, you know, or a vision, but it was energy and it was white and scintillating and it was conscious. It was my energy. It was my consciousness and it was coming out of me and it was unbelievably powerful, maybe 10,000 times more powerful than any love that I had felt before. Then it, you know, it blows up and covers all this space. This same white scintillating light is in front of me and is conscious, has my consciousness, and I recognize myself. I am that energy. So that recognition made me feel peace for the first time. For the first time in my life, I felt peace. Why? Because I recognized myself outside myself. So I was no longer the body. Clearly, I can only say it now. It, you know, it was obvious. It was, you know, part of the experience to feel peace and then joy. The same joy that I had when my first model plane that I imagined, you know, designed, built, flew properly. So I was 11 at that time. So that same joy, the spontaneous joy of something that you have that came out of me and, you know, and works. And so, but the peace I never felt before, and it was the sense of now finally I know who I am. I'm not the body. I am that love that I'm perceiving right now.
