He would tend to treat people as doormats if they behaved like doormats.
‘Not only myself, but everyone else who reported to him, we were constantly forced to make a decision. Do we want to continue to do this? Are we going to subject ourselves to this criticism? Are we going to keep pushing ourselves to do more and more? For a variety of reasons, the answer was “yes”.’
One of those reasons was straightforward. Sue McFarland didn’t just like Andy Grove. She admired him hugely. Grove was a brilliant problem-solver, a fanatical master of detail, and a man with an absolute determination to master the difficult technical projects Intel had embarked on. He drove everyone else hard, but he drove himself harder still. ‘I learned more from him than from anyone else I ever worked with before or since,’ she said.
THE NEWS OF INTEL’S BREAKTHROUGH in MOS memory technology with the 1101 and 1103 chip caused some jealousy inside competing electronics companies, but there was one place where it provoked outright despair. Inside Fairchild Semiconductor’s research department a young Italian engineer called Federico Faggin was on loan from a European joint-venture company in which Fairchild had a stake. He had spent his time at Fairchild Semiconductor working on silicon gate – the technology that proved to be the key to Intel’s 1101 memory chip – and had watched, with growing frustration, Fairchild’s failure to do anything with the knowledge that had been created inside the lab. Noyce and Moore had hired dozens of people from Fairchild, down to the lab technician (in the department) who had been working most closely on the silicon-gate process; now their new company seemed destined to commercialize it independently. But Faggin himself couldn’t follow the stars of the Fairchild research effort across to Intel. He had decided to stay in America, and his change of status from temporary exchange visitor to permanent resident meant that he couldn’t change jobs while his application was being processed.
It was another year before Faggin was ready to make his move. He called Les Vadasz at Intel, and told him that he would be interested in joining the young company. He made only one stipulation: he wanted to work on chip designs, not production processes. Vadasz invited him over to Mountain View for a chat, but refused to say anything in detail about the work that Faggin might do if he came to Intel. So Faggin was taking a leap in the dark when he accepted an offer from Vadasz and Grove, gave notice to Fairchild, and reported for work at Intel two weeks later to the day.
Boredom was evidently not going to be a problem in the new job. Vadasz explained on Faggin’s first day that Intel had entered into a contract to design a set of chips for a Japanese firm called the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation. Faggin was to be the project leader, and his first job would be to meet a client representative who was flying in from Tokyo the very next day to check on how the project was progressing.
An afternoon of reading the files and talking to his new colleagues gave Faggin the background he needed. The product Intel was working on was a desktop calculating machine sold under the brand name of Busicom, and the approach had come from Japan at a time when Intel was desperate for work of any kind. At first the client’s technical people had asked Intel to tender for a project to design and manufacture a set of eight logic chips customized specially for their calculator and pre-programmed to carry out the basic arithmetical functions it would need to offer. But with three different memory circuit projects already in progress, Intel simply did not have the resources to carry out eight new logic chip designs. It was Ted Hoff, the brilliant Stanford engineer who had come up with the idea for the DRAM cell, who proposed an alternative solution. Why not build a miniaturized general-purpose computer, he suggested, which could then be programmed to do the arithmetic for the client’s desktop calculator?
The key difference between a general-purpose computer such as the PDP-8 and the customized logic circuits required by the Busicom specification was that the PDP had a subroutine capability: it could stop in the middle of a series of program steps, go off and carry out another job, and then return where it had left off. Hoff saw that if he could only add a subroutine capacity to the Busicom design, he could then take all the high-level functions that the calculator required and turn them into a set of subroutines. The basic computer could then be stripped down to the point where it could perform only the simplest tasks, and everything else – even something as apparently basic as adding a pair of integers together – could be reduced to combinations of these simple tasks.
This was an insight of dazzling brilliance. Discussing it afterwards, however, Hoff managed to make it seem almost obvious. ‘I’d been using a digital PDP-8 computer to run full-scale FORTRAN programs,’ he recalled, ‘yet the PDP-8’s central processing unit was a great deal simpler than the Busicom machine. It got all its complexity from memory. The subtle bits were in the program, not the hardwired logic.’
After a few days of thinking about it, Hoff sketched out a plan which involved a four-chip set: a central processing unit (CPU), a memory chip for working data, a read-only memory chip ROM) where the program written specially for the Busicom functions could be stored, and a fourth device to deal with input and output, or I/O. Such a plan would be considerably less complex to design than a set of specialized logic chips – and it might well prove cheaper.
The Japanese company had initially been sceptical, particularly since its engineers had already done months of preliminary work on the logic design in the specification. But gradually, the Japanese managers came to accept the merits of the idea. Hoff’s general-purpose design would allow the company to offer a range of more complex calculators in future without having to build an entirely new set of logic chips. In a market that was becoming increasingly competitive, anything that allowed it to sell a better calculator at a lower price than its competitors was to be welcomed. And if Hoff was confident that he could deliver its four-chip set, with a tiny general-purpose computer running the arithmetical programs, then who were the engineers in Japan to doubt him? The company had handed over an advance of $100,000, and it was expecting to see some evidence that the chips for its new product were well on their way to production.
There was just one problem. After coming up with this brilliant idea, Hoff was told to concentrate his efforts in other projects. The project made some progress when another engineer named Stan Mazor, who had joined Intel from Fairchild, added a few instructions to the architecture and wrote some sample programs to prove the feasibility of the calculator design. But by April 1970, when Faggin arrived at Intel, the chip was still very far from complete. The set of instructions that the CPU would handle had been agreed, and confirmed by the Japanese engineers as correct. Hoff had drawn up an overall design for the chip, indicating broadly how many transistors it would require and which jobs would be carried out where. But when Faggin asked to see the detailed design, he got a shock. There wasn’t one – but a Busicom engineer was about to arrive in California for a progress check.
Masatoshi Shima, the Busicom engineer, was all smiles when Faggin and another designer met him at the airport. His tune changed when he saw the materials that Faggin had been ordered to show him. Shima, a talented engineer in his own right, realized immediately that it was no advance on what he had seen on his last visit. ‘You bad!’ he shouted. ‘You promised! You said design done! No design! This is just idea! This is nothing! I came here to check, but there is nothing to check!’
Faggin had been briefed not to let on that he had just arrived, but he realized that hiding the truth would merely make his position more untenable. He confessed to Shima what had happened and agreed to start work immediately. Carrying out the first piece of processor work of his career, he was now faced with a schedule that was almost impossible to meet.
Working with Stan Mazor, a fellow circuit designer, Faggin managed to turn the concepts into working prototypes of four chips at extraordinary
