Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. (was born October 28, 1937, in Rochester, New York) 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 two patents based on work he did for the General Railway Signal Corp. in Rochester, New York during summers of his college studies. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to attend Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962. For 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 proposing the idea of using a "universal processor" instead of many custom-designed circuits. He worked with Stanley Mazor in 1969 to create the architectural design and instruction set for the Intel 4004, the chip that began the microprocessor revolution in the early 1970s. Federico Faggin developed the silicon-gate design methodology and the actual chip design, leading the project from 1970 to 1971. Masatoshi Shima from Busicom defined the logic for the chip.
In 1975, Hoff started a group to develop large-scale integration for telephone industry use. This 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 digitizing 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 joined Teklicon in 1986 as an agent and worked as an employee there since 1990.
Popular culture
Hoff appeared in an Intel advertisement. The advertisement described him as the "rock star" of Intel and compared him to the rock stars who are famous in American culture.
Awards
In 1954, he was one of the finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now called Regeneron STS). In 1979, he received the Stuart Ballantine Medal. In 1980, he received the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. In 1996, he received the Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit. In 1997, he received the Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum. In 1996, he was added to 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 made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for helping create the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor. In 2011, he received the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.