Ralph Ungermann

Ralph was born in Provo, Utah on January 20, 1942. When he was 5 years old, his family moved to Santa Paula, California.

At first, Ralph wanted to study law but he changed his idea to study engineering after witnessing the launch of Sputnik 1, the first satellite ever to space. He enrolled at University of California, Berkeley and received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Then he received a master's degree in computer architecture from University of California, Irvine. After college, Ralph started to work at Kodak in Rochester, NY. He then joined Collins Radio in 1967, where he became fascinated with semiconductors and early LAN technology.

Shortly before Collins Radio was acquired by Rockwell International in 1971, Ralph left in 1970 prior to business failure and joined Western Digital. There he created the first chip capable of UART communication.

Work at Intel

After searching for a company involved in the semiconductor industry, Ralph joined Intel in 1971 under supervision of Federico Faggin. At Intel, he was responsible for microprocessor development and his team developed the USART and the I/O chips.

During the 1973–1974 stock market crash, Ralph and Faggin decided to leave Intel due to low wages and form their own company. At first they planned to be involved in the systems business, but as their departure became public via Electronic News due to Intel's popularity, Exxon reached out and convinced them to keep their dedication in microprocessors.

Work at Zilog

In 1974, Ralph and Faggin founded Zilog, Inc., the first company dedicated to microprocessor production for the personal computer. Together with Faggin, they decide to develop a better competitor to Intel 8080. Exxon became interested in this and decided to invest in the newly founded company. Thanks to the funds from Exxon, Zilog developed the Z80 and achieved enormous commercial success.

At Zilog, Ralph also developed several I/O chips like he had done at Intel such as Z80-SIO (Serial I/O), Z80-PIO (Parallel I/O) and Z80-CTC (Counter/Timer Circuit).

Due to the success of Z80, Exxon invested more in Zilog but as a result demanded more from the company. Ungermann got dissatisfied with the pressure and clashed with the Exxon management. As a result, he was asked to leave at the end of 1978.