Interview | Federico Faggin

Sorry to say, but it's really silly to think that a computer can be conscious. Consciousness — it just is impossible with mechanical things.

Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Well, I was working in Italy after graduation from university at SGS Fairchild, a company that was linked to Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that invented the integrated circuit in Silicon Valley. And in early 1968, in an exchange of engineers, I was sent to Palo Alto in the R&D of Fairchild. And there I developed the MOS silicon gate technology, which was the fundamental technology that made it possible to build an entire computer with the same technology in a piece of silicon. Before that, it could not be done. You could not do dynamic random access memories. You could not do non-volatile memories, analog devices of high capacity, and the microprocessor. So, that technology made possible all the future developments in microelectronics related to making computers.

Which is what I did later. But the first integrated circuits, they used this technology. This technology was five times faster. You could put twice as many transistors. The leakage current was 500 times less than the original MOS. So, this performance was so powerful that it made possible all of what I said. And the first integrated circuits to use that was a device from Fairchild, the 3708, which I designed as well, and it was in production by the end of '68. Intel actually took that technology, they copied it. Saying 'copied' is a gentle way to say it. And they decided to design dynamic RAMs with that technology, which was of course the fortune of Intel.

But also they had a project that was waiting for a customer, a custom project, where they wanted to build a computer, a CPU at that time. And the only technology they could do it with was the silicon gate technology. But there were a couple of additional inventions that they needed, which I brought with me when I joined Intel in 1970. So, I designed the first microprocessor, the 4004, at Intel. And then the first 8-bit microprocessor, the 8008. And the first high-performance microprocessor, the 8080, the Intel 8080, which was six times faster than the first microprocessor using P-channel technology. So, with that performance, now the market really took off. Now you could really begin to — the first personal computers used the 8080. There was sufficient performance to do that. And then I started my first company after that.

Intel did not understand that microprocessors were the future. For example, the 8080, they waited nine months to let me do it, and the microprocessor that I invented would have been so much better than what we were doing before.

Absolutely. And so, you know, I got so frustrated because we lost nine months to the competition. Because six months after the 8080 was in the market, Motorola brought to market their own first microprocessor, which was the first competitor that we had. That was 1974. So, I said, we cannot afford to lose the battle here because the other people are seeing this as the future. And when it came to the successor to the 8080, Intel was still kind of waiting it out. I said, forget it, I'm gone. So, I started my own company, Zilog, and developed the Z80 microprocessor, which was the first third-generation microprocessor. It was twice as fast and much, much better than the 8080, though it was compatible with the 8080. And that made the fortune of Zilog. And then I started other companies. In 1986, I started a company to develop chips for neural networks, to make computers that could learn. That was 40 years ago.

When the AI experts were laughing at us — 'What the hell? Neural networks will never work. What a silly idea is that.' So anyway, but obviously, in the last 10 years, neural networks are the ones that solve the problems that those people were never able to solve.

So anyway, it was during that time that I became interested in neuroscience, biology, trying to understand how the brain works. And so during that time I became interested also in consciousness, despite of course continuing to work as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of startup companies. And then eventually, by 2011, I decided to get out of everything that I was doing to focus on the study of consciousness, trying to join the physics with spirituality, with the spiritual aspect of consciousness. And so in 2011 I started a foundation, the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, to study consciousness and provide funds for institutes and universities that do that. And now we have finally the first scientific theory of consciousness. Scientific theory, because it can make predictions and it can be falsified. So, it's not just philosophy — though some physicists would like to say that, but no. It is a theory that can make predictions and can be falsified.

It was the very beginning of the adventure. In those days, the MOS technology could hardly do several hundred gates of random logic. So, not enough to make CPUs. It was slow. Bipolar was fast, but the density was very, very small. You could do at the most medium-scale integration, half adders. Not hardly a CPU on a chip. So, the only technology that eventually made possible all of that, all of what we see, is the technology that I developed in 1968. That was the missing link. And then everything started growing. At that time, it was pioneer land almost. The semiconductor industry had started. It started in '57, I believe, with Fairchild. Yeah, it started a little earlier with a company that predated Fairchild, but that company really never did much. So, Fairchild was the real thing. And the first integrated circuit — the first silicon transistors were sold in '59, and the first integrated circuit was sold in '61, '62.

And a Swiss engineer, Jean Hoerni, developed the planar process, which was the way to do many transistors on a slice of silicon, on a wafer made of single-crystal silicon. That was really the basic invention. It's surprising that Jean Hoerni is never mentioned, but he is really the inventor of the integrated circuit. So, Jean Hoerni's technology was then used for bipolar integrated circuits. And in '64, '65, the first company, General Microelectronics, came out with the first commercial MOS integrated circuit. So, those were the very pioneering years. I would probably venture to say that maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people were employed in the semiconductor industry, the high-tech industry there, in the entire Silicon Valley. Now we speak — now there are millions of them. Probably a couple million, I would think, because the entire Bay Area, both north and south of San Francisco, and also east of San Francisco, really all involved in high-tech nowadays. So, seven million are involved, where in those days it was probably not even two million people that were inhabiting that whole area. Anyway, it was orchards all over the place, which now there is no memory of it. But it was fun because nobody could claim that they were from Silicon Valley, because there were only a few farmers there that were born there.

And then everybody came from the US or from other parts of the world. So, Silicon Valley was a land of immigrants.

Yeah.

It was fairly true, though Hewlett-Packard was already there. Hewlett-Packard had started, I believe, in 1939, just prior to World War II. And they were making instruments, but they were people that had studied at Stanford University. They started the company — Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. And so there was something there, there was also some other stuff going on, but really the semiconductor was the real deal there.

Yeah, the silicon gate was a productive process. It was a new way of making integrated circuits. In those days, of course, the people that were doing the process were generally separate from the people that were doing the design of chips. But because of my sort of horizontal preparation — I had designed and built small computers when I was 19 at Olivetti — so I had the entire understanding, from computers to semiconductors to the physics of semiconductors and everything else. So, that's the reason why I was able to do what I did in those years, because most people were already specialized. If they understood how to make integrated circuits, they didn't know much about computers or much about architectural logic design, maybe at most some circuit design. And to do a microprocessor, the problem was of course to have the technology that could allow you to do it. People knew how to make computers in those days and knew how to design a computer, but you couldn't do it with the technology that existed. It was hard work because you had to draw at a scale of 500 all the transistors, and draw it by hand.

So, there was no computer-aided design that would help. Then you would do a drawing that was of course at 500 times the area. That's very difficult. In fact, if I remember correctly, there were three or four big sheets that had to be done, and they had to coincide perfectly, because the tables were not large enough to do it. And also the cutting tables — the different layers were obtained by cutting and stripping a thin film of red Mylar, or a thicker Mylar, so that you could create areas of dark and light, transparent and not. And that was also very painful and prone to errors. So, the process was extremely laborious, and everything, as I said, had to be done that way. I actually did the entire computation — because Intel didn't even want me to use computers, because it was too expensive to do simulations. So, I developed a simple method to size the transistors in ways that we would avoid having to do simulations. Because, contrary to other companies that were further ahead, Intel was just started and they didn't have logic simulators, and for the circuit simulation they didn't want to spend the money. And so I was able to do it with a slide rule and graphic simulations. So anyway, it worked.

Absolutely. You would know — I would know the function of every, not only transistor, but also every capacitor, every resistor.

And again, it was my skill with both circuit design and how semiconductors work that allowed me to solve the delicate problems that other people thought were impossible to do. Those are the two inventions that I brought with me, of that ilk. One was doing bootstrap loads with the silicon gate, because everybody thought it was impossible to do. Well, it was also difficult for me to figure it out, but I was able to figure out how to do it. And then how to do direct contact between polysilicon and silicon, so that we could have two layers of interconnection. That was why it was possible to put twice as many transistors in the same area, and therefore put the 2,500 transistors that were necessary to build the CPU, and the simplest CPU possible.

Well, it was the school of hard knocks, right? Though I knew how to obviously run several projects simultaneously. For example, at Intel I was head of one of the two departments of engineering. So, I had about 80 people working for me, most of them engineers. So, I had a large group that I was managing by the time I was leaving Intel. But what about finance? What about administration? What about production? What about marketing and sales? Those were all new things for me. So, how do you make a business plan? Whoa, how to... So, but I'm a quick study. So, I was able to do it. In those days it was almost impossible to get money on top of it. That's why we ended up having money from Exxon Enterprises, which was good in one way because we got money. In 1975, the total amount of venture capital invested in the US that year was $10 million.

Now it's seed money for one company.

The seed round for one company is $10 million. So in those days, that's it. The entire — I built the Z80, the development system, all the software and everything else with $400,000.