Marcian E. Hoff, Class of 1958
Electrical Engineer, Inventor
1937 -

Ted Hoff, who has had a lifelong fascination with electronics, today is part of electronics industry legend.

In 1968 he joined the fledgling Intel Corporation where he was the first to recognize that Intel’s new silicon technology might make a single-chip central processor possible if a sufficiently simple architecture could be developed. Hoff developed such an architecture with just over 2,000 transistors.

He invented the first electronic circuit that combined complicated computer functions on a single silicon chip, earning him recognition as the “father of the microprocessor.” This single chip had as much computing power as the first electronic computer, ENIAC, which in 1946 filled a room. The microprocessor created a revolution in computing.

Hoff is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.