Tadashi Sasaki

was a Japanese engineer who was influential in founding Busicom, driving the development of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, and later driving Sharp into the LCD calculator market.

Biography Tadashi Sasaki was born on May 12, 1915, in Hamada City, Shimane Prefecture. Not much is known of Sasaki's mother. His father was a former samurai from the garrison at Hamada Castle and a teacher. Initially, Sasaki desired to study modern Japanese literature, but he was encouraged by one of his school teachers to study science. This position was short-lived as the outbreak of war in Japan meant Sasaki would be recruited for wartime work. Sasaki was assigned to an aircraft maker called Kawanishi, which was based in the western Japanese port of Kobe. This eventually led him to obtain American patent licences to fabricate integrated chips and thus the first commercially successful pocket calculator. His frequent trips overseas to study the latest developments in semiconductor technologies earned him the popular nicknames "Rocket Sasaki" and "Mr. Rocket".

Intel 4004 Sasaki was involved in financing the development of the Busicom 141-PF desktop calculator, which led to the creation of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Sasaki attributed the basic idea to integrate the four basic parts of the calculator chipset (ROM (4001), RAM (4002), shift registers (4003) and CPU (4004)) into a single chip to an unnamed woman, a software engineering researcher from Nara Women's College, who was present at a brainstorming meeting held by Sharp in Japan in 1968. In an interview, Sasaki claimed that after meeting with Robert Noyce from Intel and arranging for Busicom to pay Intel the million he had put into Busicom, he passed the four-division chipset concept on to Intel and Busicom, which was the basis for the single-chip microprocessor design of the Intel 4004.