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For for his work as part of the team the developed that Intel 4004, the World's first commercial microprocessor. |
Masatoshi Shima
Masatoshi Shima was born on August 22, 1943 in Shizuoka, Japan. Shima received a BS in chemistry from Tohoku University in 1967 and a Dr. Eng. from Tsukuba University in 1991, Japan.
He started to work at Busicom Corp. in Japan, as a programmer of the Mitsubishi Melcom-3100 computer in the computer division. Then, in 1968, he developed the printing desktop calculator, introducing the ROM-based stored programming technology with decimal-plus-binary computer architecture. In 1969, Busicom chose Intel as the LSI development partner because Busicom’s requirement was the high density and high performance silicon gate MOS technology.
Following Marcian "Ted" Hoff's initial conception, Shima, as an employee of Busicom, jointly defined the functional specification of the 4000 series products with Hoff and S. Mazor. Then, he took the charge of the 4004 CPU’s logic design, logic simulation, and test program generation. In 1971, he developed the microprocessor based printing desktop calculator.
Shima was then recruited by Intel to design another microprocessor, which became the Intel 8-bit microprocessor 8080. Later, Shima moved to Zilog with F. Faggin and R. Ungermann to develop the Z80, which he made instruction compatible with Intel 8080. This was followed by the 16-bit Z8000.
In 1980, he returned to Japan as a director of the Intel Japan Design Center. In 1986, he established VM Technology to develop x86 compatible products of VM860 and VM8600. In 2000, he became Professor at Aizu University in Japan, retiring in 2004. He has been teaching “History of Microprocessor” at some universities.
Shima shared the Kyoto Prize with co-inventors of the Intel 4004 Marcian Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor in 1997.