Silicon Valley

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The Silicon Valley [ ˌsɪlɪkn̩ Väli ] ( English for, silicon - valley ') is one of the most important sites of the IT - and high tech -Industrie worldwide. It is geographically the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area , the metropolitan area around the cities of San Francisco and San José . Silicon Valley encompasses the Santa Clara Valley and the southern half of the San Francisco peninsula and stretches from San Mateo to San José. Sunnyvaleis roughly in the center of Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley region is approximately 70 kilometers long and 30 kilometers wide.

The region's economic development began in 1951 with the establishment of Stanford Industrial Park , a research and industrial area adjacent to Stanford University . Gradually, former electronics company employees and university graduates started small businesses and developed new ideas and products. With the spread of computer technology since the 1960s and 1970s, high-tech companies increasingly settled in Silicon Valley . Over time, numerous companies in the IT and high-tech industries have emerged in the region. The best known include Apple , Intel , Google , AMD , SanDisk , Adobe , Symantec , Yahoo , eBay , Nvidia , Hewlett-Packard , Oracle , Cisco , Facebook and Tesla .

term

The part of the name Silicon (" silicon ") refers to the research and industrial complex with over 1,000 companies in semiconductor and computer technology in the Santa Clara Valley ( Valley = 'valley').

The term Silicon Valley , which is already occasionally used for the Santa Clara Valley , mainly by Easterners, was coined in 1971 when technology journalist Don C. Hoefler, at the suggestion of entrepreneur Ralph Vaerst, wrote it in the title of a series of articles on the semiconductor industry in the weekly Electronic News published for the first time.

The name can now also be applied to the surrounding areas, as many companies have expanded. The name 'Silicon Valley' also stands for the West Coast electronics and computer industry in the USA regardless of its location.

Looking west over the Silicon Valley from the South Rim Trail at Alum Rock Park . Downtown San José on the left, Mountain View , Sunnyvale and Palo Alto on the right

history

The concentration of the computer industry in the valley is largely due to two men, Frederick Terman and William B. Shockley .

Map display of the Silicon Valley
Representation of the Silicon Valley in the south of San Francisco

The basis is the Moffett Federal Airfield , which was the central military airfield in the region as a Naval Air Station during World War II and afterwards. Several aviation companies have settled around the airport, including Lockheed . They served as a springboard for the high-tech industry.

With the beginning of the Cold War , the US government got into research funding on a large scale. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower was critical of large, centralized companies, these funds were distributed in small tranches to individual companies and universities. Northern California and the Bay Area were just one of many regions that benefited. However, there were already companies in the aviation industry there, as well as specializing in microelectronics and communication devices , such as radar or microwave technology . These areas were particularly significant and successful in technology development, making Santa Clara County the largest recipient of research funding.

The garage in Palo Alto , in 1939, the company Hewlett-Packard began

Frederick Terman, Dean of Stanford University, said the large, unused land the university owned was perfect for real estate and business. He started a program to encourage students to stay in the area by providing them with funds. As early as 1939, Terman had supported the students William Hewlett and David Packard in founding an electronics company that made good profits during World War II . Hewlett-Packard was to become the first large high-tech company in the area that was not directly connected to NASA or the US Navy .

In 1952, the program was expanded again with the creation of Stanford Industrial Park. A number of small industrial buildings have been rented to technology companies at very low cost . The site was soon well occupied, so new electronics companies settled along Freeway 101 towards San Jose. In 1954 the Honors Cooperative Program , now known as co-op , was added, which allowed full-time employees of the companies to study at the university on a part-time basis. In the mid-1950s, thanks to Terman's efforts , the infrastructure of what would become Silicon Valley developed excellently.

The facilities at Stanford Park were subject to strict building regulations. The new industrial center next to the university campus should look clean, no smoking chimneys or liquid tanks should disturb the impression. This construction method became the model for all industrial parks in Silicon Valley.

Knowledge transfer by William B. Shockley to Silicon Valley

Because of this spirit of optimism, William B. Shockley , who had made significant contributions to the invention of the transistor and was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics , decided to move to this area. He had left Bell Laboratories in 1955 due to personal differences. After the divorce from his wife and the unsuccessful attempt to obtain support from the established electronics companies on the east coast in order to further develop transistor technology to series production readiness, he returned to the California Institute of Technology , where he had obtained his Bachelor of Science. In 1956, he moved to Mountain View to found Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as part of Beckman Instruments and to live closer to his aging mother.

There he began to develop bipolar transistors with three layers based on the semiconductor material silicon is common today ; At that time, bipolar transistors were still made from the semiconductor germanium . He further developed special four-layer diodes, which, however, did not acquire any significant significance. The four-layer diode theory was promising, but it was significantly more complicated to manufacture than traditional transistors. As the project threatened to fail, Shockley grew more and more paranoid . He demanded polygraph tests from employees, published their salaries and angered those around him. As a result of these events, eight of his most talented employees left him in 1957; Fairchild Semiconductor founded this “ Traitorous Eight ” . Shockley also spoke out against research into silicon to develop today's integrated circuits .

Establishment of Fairchild offshoots

Similar processes should be repeated in the next few years. Scientists lost control of companies they founded to external managers, left their companies and started new companies. AMD , Signetics , National Semiconductor , Intel, and venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins all emerged as such foundations by former Fairchild employees.

Global center of the computer industry

This laid the foundation for today's Silicon Valley: The density of hardware companies guaranteed competence for all further developments and, with the advent of standard software in the 1970s, expanded to include software . The Computer History Museum was originally founded on the east coast, but has been located in Mountain View since 1996/2003 and shows the history of the computer and the region.

Between 1964 and 1984, Santa Clara County created 203,000 industrial jobs, 85% of them in high-tech industries. This made Silicon Valley one of the most important manufacturing locations in the United States, comparable to Detroit and Pittsburgh . Like these centers of the automotive industry, Northern California suffered from the migration of manufacturing jobs to Japan from the mid-1980s . Unlike the automotive industry, however, the computer and communications companies managed to reinvent themselves again and again with the help of venture capitalists . In particular, they were able to find completely new buyers for their products; computers were no longer only to be found in government agencies, the military and in large companies, but became indispensable tools for all businesses and moved into private households.

The next wave of founding began with the networking of computers and the spread of the Internet from 1993 onwards. The collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and 2001 was only a temporary setback in the development, with participatory Web 2.0 applications, mobile computing and the ubiquitous Smartphone continues to this day.

Regional problems

Housing market

Since 2015, Silicon Valley has hit the headlines due to the housing shortage there. In some cases, employees with six-figure annual earnings cannot afford the rent and live in tents. Leilani Farha , the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, describes the conditions in spring 2018 as "cruel and inhuman". Despite 74 billionaires living in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the 2018 cityscape is also marked by homelessness that is spiraling out of control. In the UN report, San Francisco is listed alongside the slums of Mumbai and Delhi .

Environmental impact

Map of the contaminated sites (Superfund Sites) in Silicon Valley

The first generation of companies in Silicon Valley produced electronic components on site. The production is associated with great environmental risks, especially the production of circuit boards requires the handling of enormous amounts of caustic materials and liquids as well as particularly aggressive solvents. In 1981 it was noticed that the tanks from Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM , which were installed underground because of the building regulations, had apparently been leaking for decades, had contaminated the soil and endangered the groundwater. Further research found similar stresses on Advanced Micro Devices and others. By 2004 it was determined that 75 of 96 tanks, some of which were from long-abandoned operations, remained in the ground, leaked and endangered the water. The Environmental Protection Agency declared the sites to be hazardous areas and included them in its list of the contaminated sites to be remedied with the greatest priority , the Superfund ('Compensation Fund for Environmental Damage'). Santa Clara County is the county in the USA with the most superfund sites. In 2019, there were still 23 active locations whose renovation is ongoing or imminent.

The technology groups are renovating their properties partly on their own under the supervision of the EPA. You invest considerable sums and achieve the environmental goals. In 2013 the danger of the groundwater endangerment was lifted, the soils still have to be remediated. Some of the companies affected developed new methods for the remediation of soils and groundwater, which are now also being used in other places. In 2012 and 2013, toxic gases from the ground under the former Fairchild site penetrated the building of today's user Google and exceeded the limit values. A health risk was denied, but the elimination of the causes took several weeks. The refurbishment of all Superfund sites will take several decades, according to the EPA.

Silicon Valley company

Important companies

AMD
Intel

Thousands of technology companies are located in Silicon Valley. The most important are (in alphabetical order):

Adobe Inc.
eBay
Google

Software company:

Other international companies have set up branches there:

Universities and colleges

Research institutions

Cities

Downtown San José

The following cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

Comparison of leading IT clusters worldwide

Scientists at TU Darmstadt compared the region on a world level in a 2009 study, including IT clusters such as the IT cluster Rhein-Main-Neckar (Germany), Oulu (Finland), Bangalore (India) and Silicon Valley.

Location Main business area surface Residents Employees Companies Sales
/ USD
Silicon Valley (USA) Software & hardware 4000 km² 2.3 million 500,000 7000 180 billion
Rhine Main Neckar Business software 5000 km² 7.6 million 080,000 8000 042 billion
Bangalore (India) software 0500 km² 5.0 million 080,000 1500 002 billion
Oulu (Finland) telecommunications 0400 km² 0.13 million 018,000 0800 005 billion

Imitators

In the hope of building on the success of Silicon Valley, many regions around the world have strategically developed high-tech locations to attract relevant companies. Often the unofficial name of the region is "Silicon" or "Valley" to create a connection to the original. Some of the names were introduced by public institutions for marketing reasons, while others were coined by the media or the public.

Europe

America

Asia

literature

  • Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron: The California Ideology , Telepolis, February 5, 1997.
  • Manuel Castells : Rise of the Network Society , Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2004, ISBN 3-8252-8259-7 .
  • Dennis Hayes: Behind the silicon curtain. The seductions of work in a lonely era. Free Association Books, London 1989.
  • Steven Hill: The start-up illusion: How the internet economy is ruining our welfare state , Knaur Verlag, Munich 2017.
  • David A. Kaplan: Silicon Valley. The digital dream factory and its heroes , Heyne Verlag, Munich 2000.
  • Mariana Mazzucato : The Entrepreneurial State , Demos, London 2011.
  • David Naguib, Lisa Pellow, Sun-Hee Park: The Silicon Valley of Dreams. Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York University Press, New York 2003.
  • Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism , University of Chicago Press, 2006
  • Tom Wolfe : The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce - How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley . In: Esquire 12/1983.

Web links

Commons : Silicon Valley  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from July 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Christoph Keese, Silicon Valley (2014), p. 18
  3. ↑ Don Hoefler Coined the phrase 'Silicon Valley' . In: netvalley.com . Retrieved April 19, 2015.
  4. ↑ a b c d Alexis C. Madrigal: Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History . In: The Atlantic , July 23, 2013
  5. ^ Spiegel online: Historian on the rise of Silicon Valley "Almost like a mafia clan" , November 17, 2019
  6. ↑ Aaron Sachs: Virtual Ecology - A Brief Environmental History of Silicon Valley (PDF; 235 kB), World Watch, January / February 1999
  7. ^ Bo Lojek: History of Semiconductor Engineering . Springer, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-34257-1 .
  8. ↑ Housing shortage in Silicon Valley - do you still live or are you already camping? Accessed December 19, 2018 (German).
  9. ^ Adam Brinklow: UN report calls Bay Area homeless crisis human rights violation. October 26, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  10. ↑ In the shadow of Silicon Valley. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  11. ^ According to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (→ Superfund ).
  12. ^ A b The Atlantic: Silicon Valley Is One of the Most Polluted Places in the Country , September 22, 2019
  13. ↑ Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund site: FAIRCHILD SEMICONDUCTOR CORP. (id 0901680) , accessed September 23, 2019
  14. ↑ ABB opens Silicon Valley Campus as Company Ushers in the Next Industrial Revolution with Connectivity and Smart Data. ABB Press Release, 2016-06-30, accessed January 25, 2020
  15. ↑ Source: 2009, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Ralf Elbert, Fabian Müller, Joao Daniel Persch
  16. ↑ Press release Truffle Capital: The Rhein-Main-Neckar region continues to be one step ahead in the European software industry. ( Memento from January 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 175 kB)
  17. ↑ IT lagoon . In: it-lagune.de . Retrieved April 19, 2015.
  18. ^ WirtschaftsWoche Silicon Germany: The Cluster Republic , map of the cluster regions, February 10, 2012, accessed on January 10, 2014
  19. ↑ Elisabetta Zaccolo in Rai News, of November 10, 2015: "Trieste, il polo della ricerca biotech. Elisabetta Zaccolo ci porta in uno dei centri della“ Silicon Valley ”italiana, Trieste, che è stata capace negli anni di accorpare molti istituti di level internazionale nella ricerca biomedica. "
  20. ↑ 80 million for "Silicon Austria" orf.at, August 25, 2016, accessed July 29, 2019
  21. ^ About the Association. In: Crypto Valley Association. Retrieved July 29, 2019 (American English).

Coordinates: 37 ° 23 '0 "  N , 122 ° 2' 0"  W.