Opting after high school to join the Navy, he worked as an enlisted electronics technician on aircraft systems development and testing.
[4] In 1961, Hall graduated from the University of Cincinnati and went to work for Rockwell on the Minuteman missile program and Honeywell on the YF-11 Blackbird onboard IC-based computer.
[7] Hall’s first patent, filed in 1966 while working for Jean Hoerni at Union Carbide as the company’s Director of Integrated Circuit Development, involved the invention of a sputtering process to create gold contacts in a molybdenum-based semiconductor.
[7] In 1963, Hall designed and oversaw the construction of Union Carbide's Mountain View semiconductor plant, a facility that became Intel Corporation's first manufacturing location.
Hattori, recognizing the potential of this design and future ones, funded Hall's start-up company, Micro Power Systems (MPS), in 1971.
[18] Hall conceived a “merged gate” technology that would dramatically increase the speed of integrated circuits without requiring expensive reductions in semiconductor feature size.
In 1993, while continuing to lead LIS, Hall founded Integrated Wave Technologies, Inc. (IWT) to combine the talents of former Soviet speech recognition engineers he had met with his experience in developing small, low-power electronic devices.
Hall conceived of using the compact, effective speech recognition algorithms developed by these scientists in miniaturized, low-power, special-purpose computers.
[20] With the VRT as its key product, IWT in 2008 was named by Inc Magazine as the 200th Fasting Growing Company in the U.S.[21] Hall continued to produce advanced semiconductors at LIS until his death in 2014.