<p>“William Shockley brought silicon electronics to the San Francisco Peninsula. Shockley, a Palo Alto native, had invented the transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, an accomplishment for which the group later received the Nobel Prize in physics. Shockley returned to the Peninsula to establish Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1955. In turn, Shockley recruited a group of talented physicists and engineers to work with him Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jay Last, Eugene Kleiner, and Jean Hoerni, among others. Rebelling against Shockley’s heavy-handed management style, these men left to start their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor, with financing from Fairchild Camera and Instruments in 1957. In a few years, Fairchild Semiconductor revolutionized the semiconductor industry”</p>
<p>“Fairchild Semiconductor also reshaped the Peninsula’s electronics manufacturing complex. It brought venture capital and venture capitalists to the area. Financiers and engineers involved in the establishment of Fairchild Semiconductor set up a series of venture capital partnerships such as Davis and Rock, and Kleiner Perkins. Fairchild’s success led also to an extraordinary entrepreneurial expansion on the Peninsula in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sixty semiconductor companies were established in the area from 1961 to 1972. They were almost all founded by former Fairchild engineers and managers. For example, Noyce and Moore incorporated Intel in 1968. Other Fairchild employees set up Amelco, Signetics, Intersil, National Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). These corporations exploited the revolutionary technologies developed by Fairchild Semiconductor and further enlarged the commercial markets for integrated circuits. Intel used a new MOS process developed at Fairchild to manufacture high performance computer memories. A group of Intel engineers around Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor, also designed the microprocessor, a computer-on-a-chip, in 1971. As a result of these and other innovations, the Peninsula’s semiconductor industry grew enormously in the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. The total semiconductor employment on the Peninsula grew from 6,000 workers in 1966 to 27,000 in 1977. This rapid expansion deeply reshaped the region’s electronics manufacturing complex. It transformed an industrial district dominated by tube manufacturing into the “Valley of Silicon,” as the area became increasingly referred to in the early and mid-1970s.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://nobelprize.org/physics/articles/lecuyer/[/url]”>http://nobelprize.org/physics/articles/lecuyer/</a></p>
<p>guess that leaves people to decide which source is more credible.</p>