of the formerly independent sections under the direction of Les Vadasz, and a new group was set up to directly market the microprocessors. That year, the 1973–1975 recession reached a peak and Intel laid off a number of employees. All of this led to Faggin becoming restless, and he invited Ungermann out for drinks and asked if he would be interested in starting their own company. Ungermann immediately agreed, and as he had less to do at Intel, left in August or September, followed by Faggin, whose last day at Intel was Halloween 1974. When Shima heard, he asked to come to the new company as well, but having no actual product design or money, they told him to wait. The newly-formed and unnamed company initially began designing a single-chip microcontroller called the 2001. They met with Synertek to discuss fabrication on their lines, and when Faggin began to understand the costs involved it became clear that a low-cost product like this would not be able to compete with a design from a company with its own production lines, like Intel. They then began considering a more complex microprocessor instead, initially known as the Super 80, with the main feature being its use of a +5 V bus instead of the more common -5, +5 and 12 V used by designs like the 8080. The new design was intended to be compatible with the 8080, but add many of the nice features of the Motorola 6800, including index registers and improved interrupts. Exxon investment, detailed development begins While still being set up, the industry newsletter Electronic News heard of them and published a story on the newly formed company. This attracted the attention of Exxon Enterprises, Exxon's high-tech investment arm. At the time, in the midst of the recession, there was very little venture capital available, with a total of $10 million for the entire industry being spent in all of 1975. Someone from Exxon contacted the still-unnamed company, and arranged a meeting that eventually led to them providing an initial $500,000 funding in June 1975. With funding being discussed, and a design to be built, Shima joined in February 1975. Shima immediately set about producing a high-level design, adding several concepts of his own. In particular, he used his experience on NEC minicomputers to add the concept of two sets of processor registers so they could quickly respond to