Federico Faggin

Making the microprocessor real. Faggin had developed silicon-gate chip technology at Fairchild, and at Intel he led the logic and circuit design that turned Hoff's 4004 architecture into working silicon in 1971, with Busicom's Masatoshi Shima; he etched his initials on the chip. He went on to lead the 8008 and 8080, co-founded Zilog, whose Z80 powered many early home computers, and later co-founded Synaptics, the maker of laptop touchpads.