Title:
"The Origins of Silicon Valley"
Michael Riordan
Stanford University & UC Santa Cruz
Author of "Crystal Fire - The birth of the information age" (with Lillian Hoddeson)

Abstract:

Although the transistor was invented at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, which also developed most of the related semiconductor technology, the integrated circuit or microchip was invented elsewhere — at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor Company — by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. The Forum speaker will discuss this evolution, focussing on how silicon technology reached the San Francisco Bay Area and stimulated the invention of the integrated circuit. William Shockley left Bell Labs in 1955 to found the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, hiring a crack team of Ph.D. scientists and engineers to attempt manufacturing transistors and other semiconductor devices. But eight of his lieutenants, including Noyce and eventual Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, resigned en masse in September 1957 to found Fairchild, bringing with them much of the science and technology they had learned and developed at Shockley's firm. This pivotal event marked the birth, both technologically and culturally, of Silicon Valley.

Michael Riordan is Research Physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Assistant to the Director at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After earning his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1973, he did research in particle physics at MIT, the University of Rochester and Stanford before turning to the history of science in the 1980s. He is author of the award-winning book, The Hunting of the Quark (Simon & Schuster, 1987), a history of the discovery of quarks. Riordan is coauthor with Lillian Hoddeson of a history of the transistor, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (W. W. Norton, 1997), and of a book on particle astrophysics with David Schramm, The Shadows of Creation: Dark Matter and the Structure of the Universe (W.H. Freeman, 1991). At present, he is working with collaborators on a history of the Superconducting Super Collider.