Noted visionary and natural leader, Dr. Robert Noyce (1927-1990) co-invented the integrated circuit, the first microprocessor and random access memory chips. Noyce founded two significant companies in the computer industry. An innate good nature, easy manner, patient and down-to-earth leadership style was his career hallmark.
Robert Noyce, son of an Iowa minister, tinkered with old Model Ts and discarded gasoline-powered washing machines. His passion for mechanics deepened while at Grinnell College in 1946.
By chance in an engineering class, Noyce was introduced to the solid-state transistor that was invented in 1947 by the team of Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. This spark fueled his lifelong interest in semiconductors.
Noyce earned his Ph.D. in physical electronics at MIT in 1953, then worked for Philco in its transistor division until 1955. Allured by the famous inventor William Shockley, Noyce moved to California to work with the Nobel Prize laureate at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories.
Shockley’s reputation of accomplishment was offset by rigid adherences, including germanium-based research while the rest of the industry was shifting to silicon. This frustrated his recruits. After several years, seven of the more ambitious scientists left to do semiconductor research on their own. Noyce was tempted to join the “traitors,” as Shockley referred to them, but elected to remain until, sometime later, the others enticed him to join them.
The Shockley defectors secured a business alliance with Fairchild’s president if a strong but persuasive management leader could be found for the fledgling company. The easy leadership style and effortless way of taking charge, coupled with his experience made Robert Noyce the obvious choice.
So Fairchild Semiconductor was born in a sleepy orchard valley of Mountain View, near Palo Alto, the area that would later be called Silicon Valley.
Fairchild began making silicon transistors which still had to be hand wired together. Fairchild’s founders realized the commercial success of their venture pivoted upon the development of a better production method.
Fairchild co-founder Gordon Moore joined Noyce, director of research and development. Together they investigated methods of combining transistors into a solid block of silicon. They had no way of knowing that a similar theory had been tested the summer before at Texas Instruments by scientist Jack Kilby.
After Texas Instruments publicly unveiled Kilby’s discovery at the IRE Show in early 1959, Fairchild accelerated its efforts. Their approach, connecting the tiny transistors and components, would be an integral part of the manufacturing process. Jean Hoerni, a Fairchild founder, developed the planar process that formed a smooth insulating layer on the surface of a silicon chip. Multiple layers, in this way, could be wired together and insulated from each other.
Fairchild Semiconductor filed for a patent on the planar process integrated circuit on July 30, 1959. Later, U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals upheld Noyce’s claims on interconnection techniques but also credited Kilby and Texas Instruments for constructing the first working integrated circuit.
By 1968, Fairchild Semiconductor had made its founders wealthy men. Robert Noyce longed to start over. So he and Gordon Moore left to form a new venture. They called their new company Integrated Electronics, which was quickly shortened to just Intel.
By 1970, Intel introducing the first Random Access Memory chip (RAM) for computers. Next step: the entire workings of a computer on one chip, the first microprocessor! Texas Instruments, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices and others rushed to develop their own versions.
Robert Noyce, as chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association, was working to prevent the acquisition of a Silicon Valley materials supplier by a Japanese concern when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in July 1990 at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 62.
Noyce, was a diver, oboe player, singer, and a Phi Beta Kappa at MIT.
The evolution of computer advances came slowly. British born Charles Babbage designed the first digital computer in the 1830s.
The chronology of computers includes familiar names such as Boole, Edison, Fleming, DeForest, Zworkin, Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Aiken, Bardeen-Shockley-Brattain, Univac, TI, Kilby and Noyce.
IBM’s 7000 series mainframes were the company’s first transistorized computers in 1960. MIT demonstrated computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM). And the Bank of America created a computer-readable font for digitized checking, all in that year. Much of these were not commonplace for another two decades.
J.F. Kennedy asserted that the moon trip would only be possible using the microchip.
Anecdote: the origination of the words bug and de-bugging—The
search for a computer error resulted in the discovery of a cockroach lodged in
the open contacts of a relay (switch). “That’s a bug!” Moths
had to be scraped from vacuum tubes, which always attracted them.