The portrait of Federico Faggin is in the special Italian Tech Week on newsstands with Repubblica, La Stampa, Secolo XIX: 112 pages with all the protagonists of the two days in Turin.
“I am a physicist, an inventor and an entrepreneur. I was born in Vicenza during the Second World War in a Catholic family and I obtained a degree in physics at the University of Padua in 1965, with honors ”. Thus Federico Faggin presents himself at the beginning of his latest book, Irreduciblejust released for Mondadori.
Soon after, things get more interesting, and Faggin becomes what he is famous for today: “In 1968 I moved to Silicon Valley, California, to work at Fairchild Semiconductor, where I developed the silicon gate MOS technology that made possible microprocessors, dynamic random access memories, non-volatile memories and CCD image sensors: the key components of the information revolution. In 1970 I went to work at Intel, and here I designed the first microprocessor in the world, the Intel 4004 ”.
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But already at 18, with the first job interview with the engineer Mario Chou from Olivetti, we are in the heart of the history of Italian IT. Faggin is hired and in a few months completes the project entrusted to him: an arithmetic unit to be used in an electronic calculator. It is 1961, and the CPU uses about a thousand logic gates made with germanium transistors manufactured in Italy by SGS, now known as STMicroelectronics: in 2007 the company will rise to global prominence for having built some iPhone sensors. But Faggin is not only the father of microchips, and in his biography the big names flow one after the other: Intel, IBM, Apple, Logitech, Hewlett-Packard, in a succinct compendium of the digital revolution of the last 60 years. Which also includes lesser-known companies, such as Synaptics, where he will develop the touchpad and the touchscreen.
In Silicon, his previous book, details the early American years, when he weaves relationships, accumulates success after success, but also knows bitter disappointments. One of these leads him, in 1974, to become an entrepreneur on his own, today we would say startupper: he leaves everything and founded Zilog, from which another piece of IT history comes out, the Z8 processor, still in production.
America keeps what it promises, earnings increase, Faggin and his family live a comfortable and seemingly happy life. But there is a constant thought in his mind: “I was wondering,” What do I live for? “. And at the same time I felt compelled to maintain a facade, given my responsibilities as a husband, father, and head of a promising firm that involved other people. But I felt almost dead inside, ”he writes. A question that remains unanswered, up to an episode, told in Silicon and taken up word for word in the last book. A kind of mystical experience, a bit like the ecstasies of medieval saints, with the body and soul flooded with light. However, Faggin remains a scientist: “Now I like to think that I have experienced my nature both as a“ particle ”and as a“ wave ”, to use an analogy with quantum mechanics, impossible to understand with ordinary logic. The particle aspect was the ability to maintain my identity as an observer despite experiencing myself as the world: my wave aspect. My identity is therefore that unique point of view with which One – the totality of what exists – observes and knows himself ”.
Since then – it’s 1990 – his life has changed: even as he continues to launch successful new businesses, the priority is no longer to burn one goal after another, but to preserve and grow that light seen on the shore of Lake Tahoe. He dedicates himself to investigating the concept of consciousness: a radical change, and yet ultimately also the return to an interest that he had begun to cultivate a few years earlier, that of neural networks and artificial intelligence. Faggin’s research has as its object not so much the traits common to humans and machines, but rather the differences, what makes humanity non-reducible and non-reproducible in a silicon circuit.
In 2011 he founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness, with which he sponsors research programs at universities and study centers in the USA and Italy. And, despite medals, awards, prizes, he continues to reinvent himself: so he still remains a key figure in technology today. Which, as he recalls in closing of Irreducible, “It must be used to help us discover our true nature, not to further imprison us in a meaningless virtual world. It has gotten to the point where it can truly unite us, or it can keep us divided into warring factions (…). When we understand that the choice between these options is ours alone and that we are responsible for our experiences, we can begin to truly know ourselves and the world ”.
The interview
Federico Faggin: “We are much more than machines”
by Eleonora Chioda
