Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. was born on October 28, 1937, in Rochester, New York. He is one of the inventors of the microprocessor.
Education and work history
Hoff earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1958. He applied for his first two patents based on work he did for the General Railway Signal Corp. of Rochester, New York during the summers of his college studies. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to attend Stanford University, where he earned his master's degree in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962. During his Ph.D. research, 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 in the role of "manager of applications research." He is credited with suggesting the idea of using a "universal processor" instead of many custom-designed circuits. In 1969, he helped develop the architectural idea and instruction set for the Intel 4004 — the chip that began the microprocessor revolution in the early 1970s. Federico Faggin designed the silicon-gate method and the actual chip, leading the project from 1970 to 1971. Masatoshi Shima from Busicom defined the logic for the chip.
In 1975, Hoff started a group focused on large-scale integration for telephone industry applications. This work led to several commercial products, including the first commercial monolithic telephone (named "CODEC"), the first commercial switched-capacitor filter (used with CODEC), a microprocessor for real-time conversion of analog signals (Intel 2920), and speech recognition hardware.
In 1980, Hoff was named the first Intel Fellow, the highest technical position at the company. He held this role until 1983, when he left to join Atari. After the video game crash of 1983, Atari was sold in 1984, and Hoff became an independent consultant. He later joined Teklicon in 1986 as an agent and worked as an employee there since 1990.
Popular culture
Hoff was included in an Intel advertisement, where he was referred to as the "rock star" of Intel. He was also compared to the rock stars who are famous in American culture.
Awards
In 1954, he was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now called Regeneron STS). In 1979, he received the Stuart Ballantine Medal. In 1980, he was awarded the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. In 1996, he earned the Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit. In 1997, he received the Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum. In 1996, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2009, he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama. In 2009, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his work as part of the team that developed the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor." In 2011, he was awarded the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.