Federico Faggin (born December 1, 1941) is an Italian American physicist, widely known for designing the first commercial microprocessor. He led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. Most importantly, Faggin created in 1968, while working at Fairchild Semiconductor, the self-aligned MOS silicon gate technology that made possible dynamic memories, non-volatile memories, CCD image sensors, and the microprocessor.