From Computers to Consciousness

IMT Distinguished Lecture

Abstract: Federico Faggin will describe his life experience and the major lessons learned in his long career as researcher, inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley where he has been living since 1968. Faggin will also illustrate his current efforts to understand the nature of consciousness, to which he is bringing a fresh look based on a 30-year personal journey that started with his work on artificial neural networks in the second half of the 1980s and continued with a deep personal exploration of the subject, toward a model of reality that unifies mind and matter.

Bio: Born and educated in Vicenza, Italy in 1941, Federico Faggin at the age of 19 co-designed and built a small electronic computer at Olivetti, Italy (1961). After graduating summa cum laude in physics at the University of Padua in 1965, he went on to develop the Silicon Gate Technology, the world’s first commercial self-aligned-gate MOS technology at Fairchild Semiconductor, Palo Alto, California in 1968. He also designed the world’s first microprocessors at Intel – the 4004, 8008, 4040, and 8080 – in the period 1970-1974. In 1974 he started and led the first company entirely dedicated to microprocessors, Zilog, Inc., conceiving and directing the development of the Z80-CPU, a microprocessor that is still in high-volume production today. In 1986 he started and led Synaptics, Inc., the company that pioneered the touchpads and touchscreens that have changed the way we interact with our mobile devices. Since 2011, he has been president of Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness. Faggin is the recipient of many international awards, including the Marconi Prize in 1988, the Kyoto Prize in 1997, the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama, and he was inducted in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C. in 1996.