The Man behind the Chip – “Robert Noyce”, Google today celebrating his 84th birthday. Robert Norton Noyce born on [Dec12, 1927 – June3,1990], Nicknamed as ” the Mayor of Silicon valley ” and the Co-founder Fairchild semiConductor in 1957.
He also the co-founder of intel in 1968. He is also Credited with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.

Noyce, the son of a preacher, grew up in Grinnell, Iowa. He was a physics major at Grinnell College, and exhibited while there an almost baffling amount of confidence. He was always the leader of the crowd. This could turn against him occasionally — the local farmers didn’t approve of him and weren’t likely to forgive quickly when he did something like steal a pig for a college luau. The prank nearly got Noyce expelled, even though the only reason the farmer knew about it was because Noyce had confessed and offered to pay for it

After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he took his first job as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He left in 1956 for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.
He joined William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the “Traitorous Eight” in 1957, upon having issues with respect to the quality of its management, and co-founded the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce’s impassioned presentation of his vision was the reason Sherman Fairchild had agreed to create the semiconductor division for the Traitorous Eight.

While in college, Noyce’s physics professor Grant Gale got hold of two of the very first transistors ever to come out of Bell Labs. Gale showed them off to his class and Noyce was hooked. The field was young, though, so when Noyce went to MIT in 1948 for his Ph.D., he found he knew more about transistors than many of his professors.

Robert-Noyce medal of honor

Other Resources

1. Wikipedia
2. Intel