Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce (1959)

Robert Norton Noyce (* 12. December 1927 in Burlington , Iowa ; † 3. June 1990 in Austin , Texas ) called english The Mayor of Silicon Valley "The Mayor of Silicon Valley ", was co-founder in 1957 of Fairchild Semiconductor and 1968 by Intel . He was also a founding investor of AMD in 1969 . In addition to Jack Kilby , he is considered the inventor of the integrated circuit .

Life

He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Grinnell College in 1949 and his Ph. D. in 1953 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

As a student at Grinnell College, Noyce stole a pig from a nearby farm and slaughtered it for a college lūʻau . This incident resulted in Noyce being nearly de-registered . Only the intervention of a physics professor prevented that.

After receiving his PhD from MIT, he accepted a position as a research engineer with Philco Corporation in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . He left Philco 1956 to at William B. Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments to work. After internal differences of opinion, he left the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as one of the so-called Traitorous Eight in 1957 and together with the other Traitorous Eight founded Fairchild Semiconductor .

At Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce succeeded in 1959 in producing the first monolithic integrated circuit. The invention was mainly based on the planar technology developed by Jean Hoerni (Fairchild) , with which for the first time several transistors , diodes and resistors could be placed on a silicon substrate (“chip”). Photolithographic and diffusion processes, which Fairchild Semiconductor had recently developed for the manufacture of the first modern diffusion bipolar transistor in planar technology, were already used for production. The invention of the integrated circuit is not attributed to Noyce alone. Also, Jack Kilby ( Texas Instruments ) developed at this time regardless of Fairchild a similar idea, see. Integrated circuits in the article microelectronics . The decisive factor in Noyce's invention was the complete manufacture of the components including wiring on a substrate; in contrast to Kilby's approach, which still used wires to connect the components. Nevertheless, Texas Instruments won after years of legal dispute with Fairchild, in which, among other things, it was about licenses resulting from the inventions.

In 1968 he left Fairchild Semiconductor and founded with Gordon E. Moore , the company Intel .

He received the 1966 IEEE Fellow Award for “ For leadership in research development and manufacture of semiconductor devices ” . Other awards included the IEEE Medal of Honor (1978), the Cledo Brunetti Award and the Stuart Ballantine Medal ( Franklin Institute , 1966) and the National Medal of Science (1979). In 1980 he was accepted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences . The building of Intel's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara , California , is named after him ( Robert Noyce Building ); likewise the building of the natural sciences department of the Grinnell College ( Robert N. Noyce '49 Science Center ).

Noyce died of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 62. He left the Noyce Foundation (Eng. 'Noyce Foundation'). This is currently run by his daughter Penny Noyce, her husband Leo Liu and their son Owen Liu. Jack Kilby had received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for the invention of the integrated circuit . Noyce was denied this honor as the award was not awarded posthumously .

In his honor, the awards IEEE , the Robert N. Noyce Medal .

literature

• Leslie Berlin: The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley . Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-19-516343-5
• Tom Wolfe : The New World of Robert Noyce . A pioneering story from Silicon Valley [biography]. (Original title: The tinkerings of Robert Noyce , translated by Günter Ohnemus). Econ, Düsseldorf / Vienna / New York 1992, ISBN 3-426-77009-1 (= Knaur 77009 non-fiction book).
• K. Jäger, F. Heilbronner (Hrsg.): Lexicon of electrical engineers . 2nd edition, VDE Verlag, Berlin / Offenbach 2010, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 , p. 312.

Web links

Commons : Robert Noyce  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Robert Noyce Foundation
• Tom Wolfe: The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce - How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley . In: Esquire , No. 12, 1983.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Patent US2981877 : Semiconductor device and lead structure. Filed July 30, 1959 , published April 25, 1961 , inventor: Robert N. Noyce. ‌
2. ↑ Patent US3138743 : Miniaturized electronic circuits. Applied on February 6, 1959 , published May 23, 1964 , inventor: Jack S. Kilby. ‌
3. ^ Jack S. Kilby: Invention of the integrated circuit . In: IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices . tape 23 , no. 7 , 1976, p. 648-654 .
4. ↑ IM Ross: The invention of the transistor . In: Proceedings of the IEEE . tape 86 , no. 1 , 1998, p. 7-28 .
5. ^ RG Arns: The other transistor: early history of the metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor . In: Engineering Science and Education Journal . tape 7 , no. 5 , 1998, pp. 233-240 .
6. ↑ George S. Moschytz: A Century of Honors: The First One-Hundred Years of Award Winners, Honorary Members, Past Presidents, and Fellows of the Institute . IEEE Press, 1984, ISBN 0-87942-177-0 , pp. 335-336 .
7. ↑ Died: Robert Noyce . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1990 ( online ).
8. ^ Technical history of Silicon Valley . Archived from the original on May 7, 2009. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 4, 2009.