Marcian ted hoff biography for kids

Marcian “Ted” Hoff (PhD '62 EE), is best known as the architect of the first microprocessor. Intel’s 4004 was released in November 1971, 35 years ago this month. The history that his ingenuity helped spawn is now the subject of a new DVD, the Microprocessor Chronicles. Hoff came to Stanford for graduate work after being an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Upstate New York, the region where he grew up. His career has morphed from engineering to litigation consulting, and his journey is full of interesting stories.

What was your path to Intel?

I used to play with vacuum tube circuits when I was in high school. When I graduated in 1954, I got a summer job in the company where my father worked. I always considered myself lucky to have had that job because I got to work with both magnetic cores and transistors. The transistor was only seven years old, and core memory was the major technology for computer memory. After I got my bachelor's degree, I came to Stanford to do graduate work in electrical engineering. I got a master's degree in 1959, and then did research on adaptive systems under the guidance of Professor Bernard Widrow. Together, we developed the LMS algorithm for adaptive systems, still used in modems, etc. to this day. I got my PhD in 1962 and stayed on doing government-sponsored research on adaptive systems. During that time professor Bob Pritchard, who I believe came to Stanford from Motorola, started courses in integrated circuit design. Someone suggested that I be a guinea pig for his lab course. It seems like everything went wrong in that course, but it showed how difficult it was to make integrated circuits. It was a learning experience. In the meantime, I talked about technology with Rex Rice, who often did on-campus recruiting for Fairchild Semiconductor. One thing we discussed was the possibility of semiconductor memory because, having worked with magnetic cores and knowi

Biography

Dr. Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, Jr. was born in Rochester, New York on 28 October 1937. Hoff became interested in science at an early age, and credits his interest in electronics to a subscription to Popular Science he received from his uncle when he was 12. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an undergraduate, and during his summer breaks, worked for Rochester’s General Railway Company, where he developed his first two patents. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1958, he received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to attend Stanford University, where he earned an MS and PhD in 1959 and 1962, respectively, both in electrical engineering. He stayed on to work at Stanford for another four years conducting research on neural networks and integrated circuits.

In 1968, Hoff got a phone call that would jumpstart both his career and the computer industry. Robert Noyce, who had co-founded Intel Corp., that same year, was calling to ask him to join the new company, which Hoff soon did as its twelfth employee.

In 1971 the Japanese manufacturer Busicom approached Intel requesting integrated circuits for its calculators. While the Japanese company proposed the use of twelve different chips, each to control a different process, Hoff envisioned a single chip that could do it all and began work on bringing his idea to fruition. Hoff proposed that if the architecture could be constructed simply, the memory, calculating, and processing functions of a computer could be combined into one circuit—an idea that led to the first microprocessor, a “computer-on-a-chip.” Federico Faggin led the design team on the newly commissioned project, and developed the use of silicon in constructing the chip. The team also consisted

Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. (born October 28, 1937, in Rochester, New York) is one of the inventors of the microprocessor.

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 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 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 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 chip that started the microprocessor revolution in the early 1970s. Development of the silicon-gate design methodology and the actual chip design was done by Federico Faggin, 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 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 hardware.

In 1980, Hoff was named the first Intel Fellow, which is the highest technical position in the company. He stayed in that position

American engineer Ted Hoff (born 1937) is credited with changing the face of the world as one of the key people behind the creation of the first microprocessor. While working for Intel in 1969, he developed the architecture that made a single-chip Central Processing Unit (CPU) possible. That product came on the market as the Intel 4004 in 1971 and the microprocessor industry was born. Exaggerating the impact of Hoff's invention is nearly impossible, as it became integral to a staggering array of modern conveniences and necessities that included CD players, personal computers, and medical devices.

Hoff was born Marcian Edward Hoff, Jr. on October 28, 1937, in Rochester, New York. His father, who worked in railway signaling and his uncle, a chemical engineer, were big influences on him as a boy, and encouraged his early interest in science. Chemistry was his first love, but that affection waned after Hoff was told there was no practical career to be had in research. His uncle's gift of a subscription to Popular Mechanics, however, soon filled the void with electronics. By the time Hoff was 12 years old, he was ordering books on electronics from the magazine, and a Christmas present of a radio-building kit from his parents soon sealed the deal. Electronics would be Hoff's future.

The aspiring young scientist tasted his initial success at only 15, when he was awarded a $400 scholarship and a trip to Washington, D.C., from the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He continued that winning streak after graduating from high school in 1954 and starting to work as a laboratory technician for his father's company, the General Railway Signal Company, during summer breaks from college. While still a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, he designed two circuits, one that detected trains via audio frequencies and one that absorbed energy to protect against lightning, for General Railway. Those innovations led to an inaugural pair of