Federico Faggin designed the first microprocessor. The Intel 4004 was the chip that first made it possible to put an entire programmable computer on a single piece of silicon. The process technology he developed at Fairchild Semiconductor became the foundation for every microprocessor, memory chip, and logic device built in the half-century since. The touchscreen on your phone exists because of work he went on to do at Synaptics in the 1990s, when his team replaced the trackball with capacitive touch. In between, he spent years in the 1980s building hardware for neural networks at a moment when the AI research establishment considered the whole idea a dead end. History has proven him right.

Faggin joined Jon to recount the physical reality of early chip design, from drawing transistors by hand at 500 times scale to sizing circuits with a sl ...