The creators of Intel's 4004 (arguably the beginning of the microprocessor era) and the 8080 are the same men who left and founded Zilog. I would argue that the heart (brain?) of the work making these microprocessors so great is Masatoshi Shima. Of course there were other important people involved like Federico Faggin who worked closely with Shima and brought him to start Zilog, Yoshio Kojima who recruited Shima to Busicom to start working on the calculators, and Tadashi Sasaki (Sharp) with collaboration with Robert Noyce (Intel) who invested in Kojima's company (Busicom).
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The creators of Intel's 4004 (arguably the beginning of the microprocessor era) and the 8080 are the same men who left and founded Zilog. I would argue that the heart (brain?) of the work making these microprocessors so great is Masatoshi Shima. Of course there were other important people involved like Federico Faggin who worked closely with Shima and brought him to start Zilog, Yoshio Kojima who recruited Shima to Busicom to start working on the calculators, and Tadashi Sasaki (Sharp) with collaboration with Robert Noyce (Intel) who invested in Kojima's company (Busicom).
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Tadashi_S...