This text was first revealed as “Marcian E Hoff.” It appeared within the February 1994 subject of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF model is on the market on IEEE Xplore. The images appeared within the unique print model.
However for Hoff, the microprocessor was merely one blip amongst many alongside the tracing of his lengthy fascination with electronics. His ardour for the sector led him from New York Metropolis’s used electronics shops to elite college laboratories, by way of the extreme early years of the microprocessor revolution and the tumult of the online game business, and finally to his job right this moment: high-tech non-public eye.
Pretty early in his childhood Hoff found out that the easiest way to really feel much less like a child—and a little bit extra highly effective—was to know how issues work. He began his explorations with chemistry. By the age of 12 he had moved on to electronics, constructing issues with components ordered from an Allied Radio Catalog, a shortwave radio equipment, and surplus relays and motors salvaged from the rubbish at his father’s employer, Basic Railway Sign Co., in Rochester, NY. Then in highschool, working principally with secondhand parts, he constructed an oscilloscope, an achievement he parlayed right into a technician’s job at Basic Railway Sign.
Hoff returned to that job throughout breaks from his undergraduate research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. A number of summers started with Hoff getting into the Basic Railway laboratory to search out the researchers’ two finest oscilloscopes damaged. He would restore the state-of-the-art Tektronix 545s, then transfer on to extra attention-grabbing stuff, like inventing an audio frequency railroadprepare monitoring circuit and a lightning safety unit that gave him two patents earlier than he was out of his teenagers.
The most effective factor concerning the job, Hoff recalled, was the entry it gave him to parts that have been past the budgets of most engineering college students within the l950s—transistors, for example, and even the just-introduced energy transistor. He did an undergraduate thesis on transistors used as switches, and the money prize he received for it rapidly went for a Heathkit scope of his personal.
Early Neural Networks
Hoff favored the engineering programs at Rensselaer, however not the slender focus of the school itself. He wished to broaden his perspective, each intellectually and geographically (he had by no means been various miles west of Niagara Falls), so selected California’s Stanford College for graduate faculty. Whereas working towards his Ph.D. there, he did analysis in adaptive programs (which right this moment are referred to as neural networks) and, together with his thesis advisor Bernard Widrow, racked up two extra patents.
“He had a toy prepare transferring backwards and forwards underneath pc management, balancing a brush stick. I noticed him as a kooky inventor, a mad scientist.”
—Stanley Mazor
His Intel colleague Mazor, now coaching supervisor at Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif., recalled assembly Hoff in his Stanford laboratory.
“He had a toy prepare transferring backwards and forwards underneath pc management, balancing a broomstick,” Mazor mentioned. “I noticed him as a kooky inventor, a mad scientist.”
After getting his diploma, Hoff stayed at Stanford for six extra years as a postdoctoral researcher, persevering with the work on neural networks. At first, his group made the networks trainable by utilizing a tool whose resistance modified with the quantity and course of present utilized. It consisted of a pencil lead and a bit of copper wire sitting in a copper sulfate and sulfuric acid resolution, they usually referred to as it a memistor.
“One results of all our work on microprocessors that has all the time happy me is that we acquired computer systems away from these [computer center] folks.”
—Ted Hoff
The group quickly acquired an IBM 1620 pc, and Hoff had his first expertise in programming—and in bucking the system. He needed to take care of officers on the campus pc middle who thought all computer systems needs to be in a single place, run by specialists who dealt with the bins of punched playing cards delivered by researchers. The concept a researcher ought to program pc programs interactively was anathema to them.
Ted Hoff: Very important Stats
Title
Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff Jr.
Date of start
Oct. 28, 1937
Household
Spouse, Judy; three daughters, Carolyn, Lisa, and Jill
Training
BS, 1958, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; MS, 1959, Ph.D., 1962, Stanford College, California, all in electrical engineering
First job
Planting cabbages
First electronics job
Technician, Basic Railway Sign Co., Rochester, N.Y.
Greatest shock in profession
Media hysteria over the microprocessor
Patents
17
Books not too long ago learn
Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Concept by John R. Lamarsh; A Compiler Generator by William M. McKeeman, James J. Horning, and David B. Wortman
Individuals most revered
Intel Corp. founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Intel chief government officer Andrew Grove
Favourite eating places
Postrio and Bella Voce in San Francisco, Beausejour in Los Altos, Calif.
Favourite films
2001, Dr. Strangelove
Motto
“If it really works, it’s aesthetic”
Leisure actions
Taking part in with electronics; attending operas and concert events; going to the theater, physique browsing in Hawaii; strolling his Alaskan malamutes
Automotive
Porsche 944
Administration creed
“The most effective motivation is self-motivation”
Organizational memberships
IEEE, Sigma Xi
Main awards
Stuart Balantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, IEEE Centennial Medal, IEEE Fellow
“One results of all our work on microprocessors that has all the time happy me,” Hoff informed IEEE Spectrum, “is that we acquired computer systems away from these folks.”
By 1968 scholar hostility to the federal government over the Vietnam Conflict was rising and life for researchers on campus who, like Hoff, relied on authorities funding was trying as if it’d get uncomfortable. Hoff had already been considering the chances of commercial jobs when he acquired a phone name from Robert Noyce, who informed him he was beginning a brand new firm, Intel Corp., and had heard Hoff is perhaps serious about a job. He requested Hoff the place the semiconductor built-in circuit enterprise would discover its subsequent progress space. “Reminiscences,” Hoff replied.
That was the reply Noyce had in thoughts (Intel was launched as a reminiscence producer), and that yr he employed Hoff as a member of the technical employees, Intel’s twelfth worker. Engaged on reminiscence know-how, Hoff quickly acquired a patent for a cell to be used in MOS random-access built-in circuit reminiscence. Transferring on to develop into supervisor of purposes analysis, he had the primary buyer contact of his profession.
“Engineering folks are inclined to have a really haughty angle towards advertising and marketing, however I found you be taught an incredible quantity should you hold your eyes and ears open within the subject.”
—Hoff
“Engineering folks are inclined to have a really haughty angle towards advertising and marketing,” Hoff mentioned, “however I found you be taught an incredible quantity should you hold your eyes and ears open within the subject. Attempting to know what issues individuals are attempting to unravel could be very useful. Individuals again within the lab who don’t have that contact are working at a drawback.”
From 12 Chips to One Microprocessor
One group of consumers with whom Hoff made contact have been from Busicom Corp., Tokyo. Busicom had employed Intel to develop a set of customized chips for a low-cost calculator and had despatched three engineers to Santa Clara to work on the chip designs. Hoff was assigned to take care of them, getting them pencils and paper, exhibiting them the place the lunchroom was—nothing technical.
However the technical a part of Hoff’s thoughts has no off-switch, and he rapidly concluded that the engineers have been going within the improper course. Twelve chips, every with greater than 3000 transistors and 36 leads, have been to deal with completely different parts of the calculator logic and controls, and he surmised the packaging alone would price greater than the focused retail worth of the calculator. Hoff was struck by the complexity of this tiny calculator, in contrast with the simplicity of the PDP-8 minicomputer he was at present utilizing in one other venture, and he concluded {that a} easy pc that would deal with the capabilities of a calculator could possibly be designed with about 1900 transistors. Given Intel’s superior MOS course of, all these, he felt, might match on a single chip.
Marcian E. “Ted” Hoff
The Busicom engineers had little interest in dumping their design in favor of Hoff’s unproved proposal. However Hoff, with Noyce’s blessing, began engaged on the venture. Quickly Mazor, then a analysis engineer at Intel, joined him, and the 2 pursued Hoff’s concepts, growing a easy instruction set that could possibly be applied with about 2000 transistors. They confirmed that the one set of directions might deal with decimal addition, scan a keyboard, preserve a show, and carry out different capabilities that have been allotted to separate chips within the Busicom design.
In October 1969, Hoff, Mazor, and the three Japanese engineers met with Busicom administration, visiting from Japan, and described their divergent approaches. Busicom’s managers selected Hoff’s strategy, partly, Hoff mentioned, as a result of they understood that the chip might have various purposes past that of a calculator. The venture was given the interior moniker “4004.”
Federico Faggin, now president and chief government officer of Synaptics Inc., San Jose, Calif., was assigned to design the chip, and in 9 months got here up with working prototypes of a 4-bit, 2300-transistor “microprogrammable pc on a chip.” Busicom acquired its first cargo of the units in February 1971.
Faggin recalled that when he started implementing the microprocessor, Hoff appeared to have misplaced curiosity within the venture, and infrequently interacted with him. Hoff was already engaged on his subsequent venture, the preliminary design of an 8-bit microprogrammable pc for Pc Terminals Corp., San Antonio, Texas, which, architected by Pc Terminals, was named the 8008. Hoff all the time “needed to do very cutting-edge work,” Faggin informed Spectrum. “I might see a rigidity in him to all the time be on the forefront of what was taking place.”
In these early Intel days, Mazor recalled that Hoff had various concepts for initiatives, a lot of which, although not commercially profitable, proved prescient: a RAM chip that may act like a digital digicam and seize a picture in reminiscence, a online game with transferring spaceships, a tool for programming erasable programmable ROMs, and computer-aided design instruments supposed for logic simulation.
The Intel advertising and marketing division they estimated that gross sales [of microprocessors] may whole solely 2000 chips a yr.
In the meantime, the microprocessor revolution was gearing up, albeit slowly. Hoff joined Faggin as a microprocessor evangelist, attempting to persuade those that general-purpose one chip computer systems made sense. Hoff mentioned his hardest promote was to the Intel advertising and marketing division.
“They have been reasonably hostile to the concept,” he recalled, for a number of causes. First, they felt that each one the chips Intel might make would go for a number of years to 1 firm, so there was little level in advertising and marketing them to others. Second, they informed Hoff, ‘‘We have now diode salesman on the market struggling like loopy to promote reminiscences, and also you need them to promote computer systems? You’re loopy.” And at last, they estimated that gross sales may whole solely 2000 chips a yr.
However phrase went out. In Might 1971 an article in Datamation journal talked about the product, and the next November Intel produced its first advert for the 4004 CPU and positioned it in Digital Information. By 1972 tales concerning the miracle of what started being referred to as the microprocessor began showing often within the press, and Intel’s opponents adopted its lead by launching microprocessor merchandise of their very own.
Hoff by no means even thought-about patenting the microprocessor. To him the invention appeared to be apparent.
One step Hoff didn’t take at the moment was apply for a patent, though he had already efficiently patented a number of innovations. (Later, with Mazor and Faggin he filed for and was granted a patent for a “reminiscence system for a multi-chip digital pc.”)
Trying again, Hoff recalled that he by no means even thought-about patenting the microprocessor in these days. To him the invention appeared to be apparent, and obviousness was thought-about grounds for rejecting a patent utility (although, Hoff mentioned bitterly, the patent workplace at present appears to disregard that rule). It was apparent to Hoff that if in a single yr a pc could possibly be constructed with 1000 circuits on100 chips, and if within the following yr these 1000 circuits could possibly be put onto10 chips, finally these 1000 circuits could possibly be con structed on one chip.
As an alternative of patenting, Hoff in March 1970 revealed an article within the proceedings of the 1970 IEEE Worldwide Conference that said: “A wholly new strategy to design of very small computer systems is made potential by the huge circuit complexity potential with MOS know-how. With from 1000 to 6000 MOS units per chip, a whole central processor could also be fabricated on a single chip.”
However in December 1970, an unbiased inventor exterior the cliquish semiconductor business, Gilbert Hyatt, filed for a patent on a processor and talked about that it was to be made on a single chip. In 1990, after quite a few appeals and extensions, Hyatt was granted that patent and started amassing royalties from many microprocessor producers. Presently, although historical past traces right this moment’s microprocessor again to Hoff, Mazor, and Faggin, the authorized rights to the invention belong to Hyatt.
The Invention of the Codec
Whereas the microprocessor has proved to be his most celebrated achievement, Hoff doesn’t view it as his greatest technical breakthrough. That designation he reserves for the single-chip analog-to-digital/ digital-to-analog coder/decoder (codec).
“Now that work was an thrilling technical problem,” Hoff recollected with some glee, “as a result of there have been so many who mentioned it couldn’t be executed.”
The venture was kicked off by Noyce, who noticed the phone business as ripe for brand new know-how, and urged Hoff to search out an vital product for that market. Learning phone communications, Hoff and a number of other different researchers noticed that digitized voice transmission, then getting used between central places of work, relied on using advanced costly codecs that tied into electromechanical switches.
”We thought,” Hoff informed Spectrum, “we might combine this, the analog-to-digital conversion, on a chip, after which use these circuits as the premise for switching.”
Moreover lowering the price of the programs to the phone firm, such chips would allow corporations to construct small department exchanges that dealt with switching electronically.
Hoff and his group developed a multiplexed strategy to conversion wherein a single converter is shared by the transmit and obtain channels. In addition they established various different strategies for conversion and decoding that Hoff noticed as not being apparent and for which he acquired patents.
With that venture’s completion in 1980, after six years of effort, and its switch to Intel’s manufacturing facility in Chandler, Ariz., Hoff grew to become an Intel Fellow, free to pursue no matter know-how him. What him was returning to his work on adaptive constructions, combining the ideas he had wrestled with at Stanford with the ability of the microprocessor within the service of speech recognition. After a yr he constructed a recognition system that Intel marketed for a number of years.
A first-rate buyer for the system was the automotive business. Its inspectors used the programs to assist them take a look at a automotive because it lastly left the meeting line. When an inspector famous out loud numerous issues that wanted fixing, the system would immediate him for additional info, and log his responses in a pc.
From Intel to Atari
Although his place as an Intel Fellow gave Hoff a good quantity of freedom, he discovered himself becoming bored. Intel’s success in microprocessors by 1983 had turned it right into a chip provider, and different corporations have been designing the chips into programs.
“I had all the time been extra serious about programs than in chips,” Hoff mentioned, “and I had been at Intel for 14 years, at a time when the typical keep at an organization in Silicon Valley was three years. I used to be overdue for a transfer.”
Once more, Hoff had not gone past desirous about leaving Intel when a brand new job got here to him. Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., then a booming online game firm owned by Warner Communications Inc. and a serious consumer of microprocessors, was searching for a vice chairman of company know-how. In February 1983, after discussing the scope of the concepts that Atari researchers have been pursuing, Hoff latched onto the chance.
Intel from the beginning had a structured, extremely managed tradition. At Atari, chaos reigned.
Intel from the beginning had a structured, extremely managed tradition. At Atari, chaos reigned. Beneath Hoff have been analysis laboratories in Sunnyvale, Los Angeles, and Grass Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass.; and New York Metropolis. Researchers have been engaged on image telephones, digital aids for joggers, pc controls that gave tactile suggestions, graphical environments akin to right this moment’s digital actuality, digital sound synthesis, superior private computer systems, and software program distribution by way of FM sidebands.
However Hoff had barely had time to find out about all of the analysis initiatives underneath method earlier than the online game enterprise took a well-publicized plunge. With out stable inside controls, Atari was unable to find out how effectively its video games have been promoting on the retail level, and distributors have been returning tons of of hundreds of cartridges and recreation machines. Hoff started receiving orders for employees cuts month-to-month.
“It might have been one factor if I had recognized I needed to reduce to, say, one-quarter the scale of my group,” he informed Spectrum. “However when each month you discover it’s a must to reduce one other chunk, morale actually drops.”
In July 1984, whereas Hoff was at his thirtieth highschool reunion, Warner bought Atari to Jack Tramiel. Hoff then had to decide on between convincing Tramiel that he might play a task in a narrowly targeted firm bored with funding futuristic analysis, and permitting Warner to purchase out his contract. He selected the latter.
Trying again, most people who have been at Atari in these days now view them darkly. However Hoff recollects his yr there as an fulfilling and finally helpful expertise. “Possibly I have a look at it extra positively than I ought to,” he mentioned, “however it turned out to be a very good transition for me, and the life I’ve now could be a really good one.”
“Every time you’re engaged on one drawback, there may be all the time one other drawback over right here that appears extra attention-grabbing.”
—Hoff
He now spends half his time as a advisor and half pursuing technical initiatives of his personal devising—a learnout system for machine instruments, numerous sorts of body grabbers, sample recognition, and strategies for analog-to-digital conversion. This variegated schedule is ideal for him. He has all the time felt himself to be a generalist, and has had hassle specializing in only one know-how.
“It’s simple for me to get distracted,” he mentioned. “Every time you’re engaged on one drawback, there may be all the time one other drawback over right here that appears extra attention-grabbing. However now it’s extra probably that my very own initiatives get delayed, reasonably than issues vital to different folks and their employment.”
Faggin for one shouldn’t be stunned that such unbiased work appeals to Hoff. “He by no means was the gregarious kind,” Faggin mentioned. “He favored introverted work, the pondering, the determining of latest issues. That’s what he’s good at. I all the time was impressed how he was capable of visualize an structure for a brand new IC, virtually on the spot.”
“He comes up with concept after concept, scenario after scenario. I believe if he wished to, Ted might sit down and crank out a patent a month.”
—Gary Summers
Stated Gary Summers, president and chief government officer of Teklicon Inc., Mountain View, the consulting agency that employs Hoff right this moment: “He comes up with concept after concept, scenario after scenario. I believe if he wished to, Ted might sit down and crank out a patent a month.”
“There isn’t a doubt in my thoughts that he’s a genius,” Mazor said. Summers readily concurred.
Hoff’s first venture after Atari was a voicemanaged music synthesizer, which gave off the sound of a specific instrument when somebody sang into it. Hoff’s greatest contribution to the venture was a system that ensured that the rising notes can be in tune, or at the least harmonically complement the tune, even when the singer strayed off key. He scored one other patent for this method, and the gadget was bought briefly by way of the Sharper Picture catalog, however by no means grew to become an enormous success.
Hoff nonetheless contributes often to product designs. At Teklicon, nevertheless, the place he’s vice chairman and chief technical officer, most of his consulting is finished for attorneys. Hoff has a novel mixture of lengthy expertise with digital design and long-standing pack rat habits. His dwelling workshop accommodates about eight private computer systems of various makes and vintages, 5 oscilloscopes, together with a classic Tektronix 545 scope, 15000 ICs inventoried and filed, and cabinets loaded with IC knowledge books relationship proper again to the Nineteen Sixties.
“If my washer breaks down, I name the repairman. Most intelligent engineers would purchase the substitute gear and set up it. Ted is able to analyzing the explanation the gear failed within the first place, redesigning a greater gear from fundamental rules, carving it out of wooden, casting it at his dwelling, and dynamically balancing it on his lathe earlier than putting in it.”
—Mazor
When a lawyer exhibits him a patent disclosure, even one many years previous, he can decide whether or not or not it might then have been “decreased to observe” and whether or not it supplied adequate info to permit “one in every of extraordinary talent within the artwork” to observe the invention. Then he can construct a mannequin proving his conclusion, utilizing classic parts from his assortment, and exhibit the mannequin in court docket as an professional witness. This model-building can get very fundamental. On Spectrum’s go to, Rochelle salt crystals that Hoff tried to develop for a latest court docket demonstration littered his workshop ground, subsequent to metal-working gear that he makes use of to construct instances for his fashions.
Hoff sees this potential to get all the way down to fundamentals as one in every of his strengths. “I relate issues to basic rules,” he mentioned. “Individuals who don’t query the assumptions made going into an issue typically find yourself fixing the improper drawback.”
Mazor mentioned, “If my washer breaks down, I name the repairman. Most intelligent engineers would purchase the substitute gear and set up it. Ted is able to analyzing the explanation the gear failed within the first place, redesigning a greater gear from fundamental rules, carving it out of wooden, casting it at his dwelling, and dynamically balancing it on his lathe earlier than putting in it.”
Doing authorized detective work appeals to Hoff for an additional purpose: it offers him an excuse to hunt for attention-grabbing “vintage” parts at flea markets and electronics shops.
Hoff can’t talk about the specifics of patent instances he has been concerned with. A number of not too long ago have been within the online game space; others have concerned numerous IC corporations. In various instances, Hoff was assured that his facet was proper, and his facet nonetheless misplaced, so he felt little shock when the microprocessor patent was granted to Hyatt. (After the award was made, although, he did sit down with Hyatt’s patent utility and tried to design a working microprocessor primarily based on Hyatt’s disclosures. He discovered a number of incongruities—like a clock fee solely suited to bipolar know-how with logic that would solely be rendered in MOS know-how, and logic that required far too many transistors to placed on a chip, proving in his thoughts that the award was incorrect.)
Seeing another person get credit score for the microprocessor, significantly in latest media reviews, “is irritating,” Hoff informed Spectrum, “however I’m not going to let it hassle me, as a result of I do know what I did, I do know what all the opposite folks on our venture did, and I do know what sort of firm Intel is. And I do know that I used to be the place the motion was.”
Editor’s word: Hoff retired from Teklicon in 2007. He at present serves as a choose for the Collegiate Inventors Competitors, held yearly by the Nationwide Inventors Corridor of Fame. Lately, his predominant technical pursuits encompass power, water, and local weather change.
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