The rise of Silicon Valley

The rise of Silicon Valley. Hewlett-Packard was Silicon Valley s first large firm and due to its success one of the area s most admired electronics firms.

While HP was important for the initial growth of the area and at first was based on electronic devices, the actual Silicon Valley fever was launched in the mid-1950s with Shockley and Fairchild, and other semiconductor firms, and went on to the microelectronics revolution and the development of the first PCs in the mid-1970s, continuing till today.

Invention of the transistorOne major event was crucial for this whole development.

It was the invention of the transistor that revolutionized the world of electronics. By the 1940s, the switching units in computers were mechanical relays, which were then replaced by vacuum tubes. But these vacuum tubes soon turned out to have some critical disadvantages, which impeded the further progress in computing technology. In contrast, transistors were much better. They could perform everything the vacuum tubes did, but required much less current, did not generate as much heat, and were much smaller than vacuum tubes. The use of vacuum tubes, which could not be made as small as transistors, had meant that the computers were very large and drew a lot of power.

For example the famous American ENIAC, built in 1946 and consisting of more than 18,000 vacuum tubes, had a total weight of 30 tons, filled a whole room of 500 square meters and consumed 150 KW per hour. The breathtaking development in computers can be seen, when comparing the ENIAC with today s laptops which are portable with about 5 kg, are battery driven and run some 100,000 times faster.

This development was launched by the transistor short for transfer resistance invention in 1947 by William Shockley and his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. This major invention of the century was made at the Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which are the R D arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company AT T . And in 1956, the three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention that had more significance than the mere obsolescence of another bit of technology.

The transistor is a switch - or, more precisely, an electronic gate, opening and closing to allow the passage of current. Transistors are solid-state and are based on semiconductors such as silicon. The crystals of these elements show properties, which are between those of conductors and insulators, so they are called semiconductors.

The peculiarity of semiconductor crystals is that they can be made to act as a conductor for electrical current passing through it in one direction only, by adding impurities or doping them - for instance, adding small amounts of boron of phosphorus. Shockley SemiconductorIn 1955, William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, decided to start his own company, Shockley Semiconductor, to build transistors, after leaving the Bell Labs. The new firm was seated in Palo Alto in Santa Clara County, California, where he had grown up. Shockley man aged to hire eight of the best scientists from the East Coast, who were attracted by his scientific reputation.

These talented young men - the cream of electronics research - represented the greatest collection of electronics genius ever assembled. Their names were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. But however brilliant Shockley was, who was called a marvelous intuitive problem solver and a tremendous generator of ideas by Robert Noyce, it soon turned out that he was hard as hell to work with, as his style was oppressive and he didn t have trust and faith in other individuals.

When Shockley refused the suggestions of his eight engineers who wanted to concentrate on silicon transistors, while their boss pursued research on four-layer diodes, they decided to quit and start their own firm in 1957. Within several months Shockley had to shut down his firm, since he had lost his engineers, whom he called traitors and they are now known as the Traitorous Eight. Although Shockley was not very successful with his firm in Palo Alto, he deserves credit for starting the entrepreneurial chain-reaction that launched the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, since he had brought together excellent scientists there like Robert Noyce without whom there might never have been a Silicon Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula at all. Or as M. Malone calls it, Shockley put the last stone in place in the construction of Silicon Valley.

The father of one of those young men who left Shockley had contacts to a New York investment firm, which sent a young executive named Arthur Rock to secure financing for their new enterprise.

Rock asked a lot of companies, if they were interested in backing this project, but has not been successful so far. The concept of investing money in new technology ventures was largely unknown then, and indeed the term venture capital itself wouldn t be coined until 1965 - by Arthur Rock, who should become Silicon Valley s first and most famous venture capitalist later on. Finally, due to Rock s efforts, the Traitorous Eight managed to obtain financial support from industrialist Sherman Fairchild to start Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Fairchild Semiconductor was developed by Shockley s firm, and as the still existing granddaddy of them all has itself spawned scores of other companies in Silicon Valley Most semiconductor firms roots can be traced back to Fairchild.

The most famous ones of them are National Semiconductor, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices AMD and many well-known Valley leaders have worked at Fairchild, e.g. Charlie Sporck National Semiconductor , Jerry Sanders AMD s founder , Jean Hoerni, and last but not least Robert Noyce, who is considered the Mayor of Silicon Valley due to his overwhelming success.

Robert Noyce was born in southwestern Iowa in 1927. His father was a preacher in the Congregational Church and thus was perpetually on the move to new congregations, his family in tow. When the Noyces decided to stay at the college town of Grinnell, Iowa, for a longer period of time after many years of moving, this place meant stability in young Bob s life and thus would become his first and only real home, which he would later regard as important for his eventual success.

After high school, Robert studied at Grinnell College.

His physics professor had been in contact with John Bardeen one of the three inventors of the transistor and obtained two of the first transistors in 1948, which he presented his students, including Bob Noyce. This aroused young Robert s interest in semiconductors and transistors, which made him try to learn everything he could get about this fascinating field of solid-state physics. Having graduated from Grinnell College he continued his studies at the premier school of science on the East Coast, MIT, where he met famous scientists like Shockley.

He received his doctorate, and decided to work at Philco until 1955, when he was invited by William Shockley to join a new firm named Shockley Semiconductor in Santa Clara County - together with seven other splendid scientists. When the so-called Shockley Eight started a new venture with Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce began his own transformation from engineer to business manager He was chosen to lead the new company as he seemed the best to do this job. Fairchild Semiconductor focused on building a marketable silicon transistor applying a new manufacturing process called mesa. Despite being the smallest company in electronics business then, it attracted public attention, particularly in 1958, when Big Blue - as dominant IBM is nicknamed - ordered the first-ever mesa silicon transistors for memory drivers in its computers.

This order contributed to the early success of Fairchild Semiconductor, and indicated the beginning of a long relationship between IBM and Silicon Valley.