
We recently hosted Federico Faggin, famous Italian physicist, inventor and entrepreneur, at the Politecnico di Milano. Since 1968 he has lived in the United States, where he obtained U.S. citizenship.
He is considered an icon by all computer and digital enthusiasts, as his name is inextricably linked to the invention of the microchip.
He was, in fact, the project leader for the Intel 4004 microprocessor and responsible for the development of the 8008, 4040, and 8080 models and their respective architectures. He was also the developer of MOS technology with silicon gate, which enabled the fabrication of the first microprocessors, EPROM and dynamic RAM memories, and CCD sensors—essential components for the digitisation of information.
In 1974 he founded and directed ZiLOG, the first company dedicated exclusively to microprocessors, where he created the famous Z80 model. In 1986 Faggin co-founded and ran Synaptics, a company that developed the world’s first touchpads and touch screens.
Faggin was guest of honour at the 2024 edition of the PhD IT Colloquia Doctoralia held by the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering. This was an opportunity for our third-year PhD students in Information Engineering to publicly present the results of their research.
In his talk “Consciousness, life, computers, and human nature”, Faggin reflected on the crucial issues for the future of technology and humanity. He granted us an illuminating interview on the sidelines of the event.

Good morning Faggin, and thank you for meeting us. Before meeting you I wanted to get to know you better by reading Silicio, your autobiography published a few years ago, where you marked passage of the story through different phases of your life. What are they?
In my book I talked about my “four lives” because the position I hold today is inseparable from the path I have taken.. Actually, I think that, in my human journey, which has been extraordinary, nothing has happened by chance. It’s as if overcoming certain types of tension requires things to be shaken up a bit. But the breaking points of this continuity can be explained, they all make sense.
Can you tell us the story of your journey from the beginning, how these different phases of your life occurred in sequence?
My first life, of course, started from my birth, in 1941 in Vicenza.
I learned a lot in Italy, studying at the industrial technical institute, where my passion for computers and transistors began. I immediately found a job as a technician at Olivetti, in the electronics laboratory in Borgolombardo, where the first digital computers were made. My boss realised what I was capable of, and I was soon assigned to the experimental design of a small transistor computer, with a support team of four technicians.
It was a very important training experience, because back then Olivetti was the pioneer company in Italy in the computer sector. It kindled my desire to continue my studies.
When universities were first allowed to accept students who had graduated from technical high schools, I left that job and enrolled to study Physics in Padua, supporting myself without ever asking my parents for money.
Why Physics and not Engineering?
I chose Physics because for me Engineering was already part of me, part of my everyday life, in my experience as an expert and model-maker. I already knew how to use my hands back then.
And after your degree, what did you decide to do?
After my degree I was offered a position as a paid assistant. After a year I left university to join CERES, a small startup that sent me to California to take a course on MOS technology (Metal Oxide Semiconductor), or the “metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor”, fundamental for the developments of the time.
Later I joined SGS (now STMicroelectronics), the only Italian company to produce semiconductors, licensee of Fairchild Semiconductor for bipolar integrated circuits. Here my training was crucial, because I was tasked with developing the technology of their first MOS process.
When did your second life begin?
My second life was the period when I emerged as what I think of as a creator, an inventor.
There was a precise date, namely February 9, 1968, the day that Elvia and I, whom I had met in my third year of university and in the meantime had become my wife, left for San Francisco.
SGS proposed that I spend six months in the United States on an engineering exchange with Fairchild, the world’s most advanced semiconductor company. I wanted to stay for five years, but 56 years have gone by and I’m still there.
I was included in the project to develop a self-aligning MOS technology using a silicon port instead of an aluminium one.
I did a lot of work on silicon gate technology (SGT) which, was finally ready to be presented to the public in October 1968.
Soon afterwards, though, I moved on to join Intel. Why?
By the autumn of 1969 Fairchild was losing its leadership and the newly formed Intel was announcing its first silicon gate technology product.
Frustrated by Fairchild’s delays in what would be the technology of the future, in 1970 I switched to Intel, where I could devote myself to designing a commercial integrated circuit.
In those months I was both project leader and designer of four chips. After a frantic period of work, in January 1971 I made it to the finish line: the Intel 4004 worked. We had given birth to the first microprocessor!

What actually makes you the father of this invention?
My commitment and my passion with which I proved that SGT was the right technology, turning all the ideas I had into the final product, the silicon chip that worked. This was the only step missing, and I was the one who took it, with my own strength and against all odds.
And how would you define your third life?
It is my life as an entrepreneur. In 1974 I decided I wanted to leave Intel. I was tired of fighting for everything I wanted to do. Moreover, there had been no recognition for all the work I had done over and beyond the call of duty to make the company achieve that great goal. It was thanks to the determination of my wife Elvia that we found the strength to ensure that the truth was eventually restored.
It was difficult to leave, because the senior management of the company wanted to foil all my attempts to break free at all costs. But finally, at the end of 1974, my new company was born: Zilog.
The first product to work on was a new state-of-the-art microchip. After a year and a half, in July 1976, we launched the Z80, which was one of the most widely used CPU families of all time. In fact it was still in production until this year. We are talking about 48 years of uninterrupted commercial success.
The Communication Cosystem was also one of your pioneering insights. Can it be considered the “grandfather” of the smartphone?
It was the idea of a smart phone that, when connected to the PC, could handle voice and data, productivity, time management and messaging applications. The target was company managers, and it was an important step in the transition to the office of the future.
It was a real innovation, considering that at the time there were no GUI and multitasking operating systems.
The system did not live up to our expectations of success, because it was 1984, a period of caution in the sector due to the liberalisation of the telecommunications market.
But I remember that Steve Jobs complimented me on the product, even though he pointed out that it took up too much desk space.
Then Synaptics came along…
In 1986 artificial neural networks was a hot topic. After evaluating the opportunities for this business, I joined the company full-time as a technical director, proposing to develop artificial neural networks capable of learning using floating-gate MOS transistors.
In the early 1990s, when I was CEO of the company, the trackball for laptops was going into production. I was thinking of better solutions than that, so I talked to the engineers about developing something new. After a while we came up with the concepts and designs of both the capacitive touchpad and the touchscreen. And how these technologies have dramatically changed our lives is history.

What have you learned in your new capacity as an entrepreneur?
I have come to learn everything it takes to run a company: the financial, marketing, sales, and production aspects. But also the human aspects and those that regard a company’s interaction with societies. I matured a lot, in this stage too.
Without this entrepreneurial experience and without the lesson I learned the hard way when I left Intel, I would probably not have known the awakening experience I had later, which changed my perspective on consciousness, on free will, on who we are.
And so we come to your fourth life…
The phase I call my fourth life started in 1990.
The turning point came for me when, one night in December, during the Christmas holidays, I was trying to fall asleep and felt a very powerful charge of energy-love in my chest, which I had never felt before. It’s hard to explain for those who have never experienced it, but at that time I felt it deeply and directly in my own body. For me that experience carried an extraordinary force of truth.
Since then, for a period of twenty years I have lived two lives simultaneously, continuing my third life as head of a couple of startup companies, but with a commitment to exploring my own consciousness and questioning reality.
From 2008-2009 I decided to devote myself completely to my fourth life, and I sold the company. From that moment on, I decided to focus entirely on strengthening the union between science and spirituality, developing my theory and creating the foundation that bears my name and that of my wife.
Have you developed a real scientific theory?
Yes, it is indeed a scientific theory because it has the defining characteristic of being falsifiable. And what’s more, it says things that are fundamentally new.
When developing it I started from consciousness, from free will, as fundamental properties that exist at the beginning of the universe.
What is your theory based on?
To state my theory, I started with quantum physics, not classical physics. Quantum physics is not self-explanatory. On the surface it is almost contrary to our idea of reality.
Science says that we are biological machines and when the machine breaks down it’s over. It’s what I call scientism: a reality made up of objects that move in space and time. This reality is, in my opinion, secondary. The primary reality is the universe’s knowledge of itself. The totality of everything that exists wants to know itself.
I believe that we are quantum realities that exist in a broader reality beyond space-time, which also encompasses physical reality. There is a coherent and holistic entity that creates quantum fields, which have consciousness and free will. When this entity wants to know itself it creates a quantum field, a whole part of itself that has the same characteristics as itself.

I take my cue from the lab where we are guests, the NECSTLab. Here many students, PhD Candidates, and professors participate in NECSTCamp, a project that deals in a holistic way with well-being inside and outside the lab, from sport, to nutrition and psychological support. How do you think people can independently investigate the relationship between consciousness and reality? Do they have to have an impactful experience like the one you had?
We should take what we feel inside seriously. The first step is always to question ourselves. Our emotions are the window through which we can learn more about ourselves.
I definitely had an experience that was a turning point, which unlocked so many things. At the time, when it happened, I thought I was separate from the world, as we all think. And after this experience, I felt part of the whole world. It was as if at that moment I was both the observer and the observed. That energy that had come out of me had brought love, joy and peace. It was physical energy, not an idea. At that moment I was observing myself. Perhaps such experiences cannot be understood unless you experience them firsthand.
Will machines ever have a degree of consciousness comparable to that of humans?
Does the computer wonder why it exists? No, the computer is a machine and it does what we’ve told it to do. The computer can never learn more than we know.
It is scientists who need to start using technology ethically. And laws alone are not enough for this.
Today we are teaching computers to do things that are only partially what we have told them to do. We’re giving computers a certain amount of freedom, but they can’t handle it because they don’t understand anything.
And that, right there, is the danger of artificial intelligence. Because we’ve created algorithms and taught them things that from a perspective of reality are probable and not deterministic outcomes. That’s why the computer can say things that can be true or false. Before it did exactly what we told it to do, but now we have given it some freedom, but without teaching it to understand what it does. And of course it could therefore make some serious mistakes.
In your opinion, can the path that artificial intelligence has taken be stopped?
No, the road is mapped out in stone now. But it will run into many limits, and very soon.
What have we done to fuel these artificial intelligences? We’ve fed them all the human knowledge we’ve collected over the last two thousand years.
But if we want them to learn new things, we have to create these new things, the computer can’t do that. The computer can only reshuffle what we had taught it. So, since it doesn’t have the ability to create, if we give it new data that is contradictory to the data we gave it before, it will make even more mistakes and not fewer. Because since it is unable to understand, it cannot reconcile any discrepancies that gradually arise.

What is the current problem of artificial intelligence?
It could be that it goes in a wrong direction. Its tools today are being given to everyone, they are becoming accessible to the general public. And the downside is that this way they can end up in the hands of bad guys.
What would you like to discover today?
Well, I think I’ve discovered enough. I would love to find safe ways to allow those interested to have these direct experiences of consciousness. Because it didn’t happen by chance to me either: I wanted to understand.
How important is free will, in an age of artificial intelligence, also as a tool to keep it under control?
This is a difficult time, when most scientists maintain that free will does not exist. That’s what I mean by scientism: applying explanations that are valid for classical physics to our own inner selves, a field in which classical physics has no place. That’s the difference right there.
The origin of the problem is that no one understands quantum physics. I didn’t understand it either, but now, with this new theory, it can be understood and explained in a very simple way.
In your book you talked about when you reached Silicon Valley in 1968 with your wife Elvia. You thought you would be there for five years, and you stayed a lifetime. You described San Francisco at the time as an open and welcoming society.
There was a very high level of openness to others. But it was inevitable: at that time everyone was arriving there from elsewhere, right? And then there was that beautiful sense of freedom. There was no one digging their heels in to protect their land.
We were there because there was hardly anyone there, yet. I came from Italy and someone else came from Texas, some was from China, others from Germany. There was a sense of fraternity, if you like, we all got along well. And we all wanted to do the same thing, which was to carry this new technology forward.
There was also a strong aspect of the dreamer among us. Now there is much less, because then everything became business, big business. Today there is much more of a need to be there, to get rich, than to do new things for the pleasure of doing them and not to increase your billions.
It’s true, today’s Bay Area embodies the strongest social disparities: the world’s richest men alongside painful levels of poverty and marginalisation. Do you think we can change course?
A change will not be possible as long as we believe in the principle of survival of the fittest. A principle that justifies selfishness, competition, getting rid of our fellow human beings. “I am a better option that you, so I survive and you die”.
And instead, this new theory of mine simply says that we want to know ourselves; but in order to know ourselves, we must know one other, because each one of us is a whole part of the same global thing. We have everything we need within us, but to know everything I have to know my fellow human beings, and that means cooperation.
