Stan Mazor was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1941. He studied mathematics at San Francisco State University.
In 1964, Mazor joined Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, first as a programmer, then as a computer designer in the digital research department. While there, he helped specify and implement the Symbol high-level language computer, for which he received a patent.
In 1969, he left Fairchild for Intel, where he worked under Marcian "Ted" Hoff on the Busicom calculator's instruction set and architectural specifications. In 1971, as part of a team that included Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima, he developed the Intel 4004 microprocessor, or "computer-on-a-chip," the world"s first commercially available microprocessor.
Mazor wrote software for the revolutionary new chip and also proposed the first 8-bit microprocessor (the 8008) and was codeveloper of Intel-s popular 8080 microprocessor.
In 1974, Mazor moved to Intel's Brussels office as a field applications engineer helping customers to use Intel products.
During the 1980s, he worked at Silicon Compiler Systems and Synopsys. He has lectured at universities around the world, including Stanford University and the University of Santa Clara.
Mazor shares the Kyoto Prize (1997) with Shima, Hoff, and Faggin and the US National Medal of Technology (2009) with Hoff and Faggin.
