Session D5: Origins of Silicon Valley

Prehistory of Silicon Valley, from 1910 to 1965

The term ``Silicon Valley'' was coined in 1971, some six decades after the emergence of the San Francisco Bay Area as a center of innovation and invention in the fields of radio and electronics. The geographical position of San Francisco with respect to continental and Pacific transportation and communication needs; the growth of West Coast universities, markets, and population; the importation of talent from the East; innovative industrial and business methods--all these provided a thriving center of instrumentation, electronics, avionics, and high energy physics when Silicon arrived in the ``Valley of the Heart's Delight.''   

W. W. Hansen, Microwave Physics, and Silicon Valley

The Stanford physicist W. W. Hansen (b. 1909, AB '29 and PhD '32, MIT post-doc 1933-4, Prof. physics '35-'49, d. 1949) played a seminal role in the development of microwave electronics. His contributions underlay Silicon Valley's postwar ``microwave'' phase, when numerous companies, acknowledging their unique scientific debt to Hansen, flourished around Stanford University. As had the prewar ``radio'' companies, they furthered the regional entrepreneurial culture and prepared the ground for the later semiconductor and computer developments we know as Silicon Valley. In the 1930's, Hansen invented the cavity resonator. He applied this to his concept of the radio-frequency (RF) linear accelerator and, with the Varian brothers, to the invention of the klystron, which made microwave radar practical. As WWII loomed, Hansen was asked to lecture on microwaves to the physicists recruited to the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Hansen's ``Notes on Microwaves,'' the Rad Lab ``bible'' on the subject, had a seminal impact on subsequent works, including the Rad Lab Series. Because of Hansen's failing health, his postwar work, and MIT-Stanford rivalries, the Notes were never published, languishing as an underground classic. I have located remaining copies, and will publish the Notes with a biography honoring the centenary of Hansen's birth. After the war, Hansen founded Stanford's Microwave Laboratory to develop powerful klystrons and linear accelerators. He collaborated with Felix Bloch in the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. Hansen experienced first-hand Stanford's evolution from its depression-era physics department to corporate, then government funding. Hansen's brilliant career was cut short by his death in 1949, after his induction in the National Academy of Sciences. His ideas were carried on in Stanford's two-mile long linear accelerator and the development of Silicon Valley.   

From Bell Labs to Silicon Valley: A Saga of Technology Transfer, 1954-1961

Although Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor and developed most of the associated semiconductor technology, the integrated circuit or microchip emerged elsewhere--at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor Company. I recount how the silicon technology required to make microchips possible was first developed at Bell Labs in the mid-1950s. Much of it reached the San Francisco Bay Area when transistor pioneer William Shockley left Bell Labs in 1955 to establish the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, hiring a team of engineers and scientists to develop and manufacture transistors and related semiconductor devices. But eight of them--including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, eventually the co-founders of Intel--resigned en masse in September 1957 to start Fairchild, bringing with them the scientific and technological expertise they had acquired and further developed at Shockley's firm. This event marked the birth of Silicon Valley, both technologically and culturally. By March 1961 the company was marketing its Micrologic integrated circuits, the first commercial silicon microchips, based on the planar processing technique developed at Fairchild by Jean Hoerni.