Intel pioneer Leslie Vadasz retires.

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp. said on Thursday that Leslie Vadasz, part of the team that founded the world"s largest semiconductor maker 35 years ago, is retiring.

Vadasz, 66, held a variety of engineering and business management positions at Intel. He managed the design team that developed the world"s first microprocessor -- the "4004," which was released in November 1971.

The chip had 2,300 transistors, or on-off switches, compared with the Pentium 4 chip"s 57 million transistors. It was the first general-purpose chip and had the same processing power as a digital scale a supermarket butcher would use today.

He also oversaw the development of the first merchant market large-scale integrated dynamic random access memory (DRAM), standard memory used in PCs and other devices, and the first erasable, programmable read-only memory (EPROM), which is a storage device for electronic devices.

Vadasz was elected vice president of Intel in 1975 and served on the board of directors from 1988 until 2002 when he reached 65, the mandatory retirement age. He will remain a director emeritus.

John Miner, general manager of Intel Capital, will replace Vadasz. Intel Capital has invested in more than 1,000 companies in more than 30 countries since Vadasz established it in 1991.

The Santa Clara, California-based company has used the investments to bolster its growth in areas like computing and wireless networking.

© Reuters