Silicon Valley - Origin of the term, History, Notable companies, Universities, Cities, Trivia, Further reading

Santa Clara County, W California, USA, between Palo Alto and San José; a world centre since the 1970s for electronics, computing, and database systems.

Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high tech businesses in the area.

Silicon Valley encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the San Francisco Peninsula and East Bay. The Highway 17 corridor through the Santa Cruz Mountains into Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz County is sometimes considered a part of Silicon Valley.

Origin of the term

The term Silicon Valley was coined by journalist Don Hoefler in 1971. He used it as the title of a series of articles "Silicon Valley USA" in a weekly trade newspaper Electronic News which started with the January 11, 1971 issue. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.

For many years in the 1970s and 1980s, journalists often referred to it as Silicone Valley. Unfamiliar with silicon, writers assumed that it was a misspelling of silicone, a material used in caulking, breast implants, and other products that had recently been introduced to the public.

History

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of U.S. Navy work, as well as the site of the Navy's large research airfield at Moffett Field.

However, there was almost no civilian "high-tech" industry in the area. He decided that a vast area of unused Stanford land was perfect for real estate development, and set up a program to encourage students to stay in the area by enabling them to easily find venture capital.

In 1951 the program was again expanded with the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park), a series of small industrial buildings that were rented out at very low costs to technical companies.

It was in this atmosphere that a former Californian decided to move to the area. After divorcing his wife, he returned to the California Institute of Technology where he had received his Bachelor of Science degree, but in 1956 moved to Mountain View, California to create the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as part of Beckman Instruments and to live closer to his aging mother.

There he intended to supersede the transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode) that he felt would take over the market, but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. Shockley, unlike many other researchers using Germanium as the semiconductor material, believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. As such, it was Shockley who first brought silicon to the valley with his Mountain View Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at 391 San Antonio Road, marked today as an historic landmark.

Over the next few years this pattern would repeat itself several times, as engineers lost control of their own startups to outside management, and then left to form new companies.

By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both.

The Valley also significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft.

Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services.

Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley.

Notable companies

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:

Adobe Systems Advanced Micro Devices Agilent Technologies Apple Computer Applied Materials Cisco Systems eBay Electronic Arts Google Hewlett-Packard Intel Intuit Juniper Networks Maxtor National Semiconductor Network Appliance NVIDIA Corporation Oracle Corporation Sun Microsystems Symantec Xilinx Yahoo!

Additional notable companies headquartered in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):

3Com Adaptec Amdahl Atmel Cypress Semiconductor Foundry Networks Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Knight-Ridder (acquired by The McClatchy Company) LSI Logic McAfee Netscape (acquired by AOL) NeXT Computer, Inc. PayPal (now part of eBay) Rambus Redback Networks SanDisk Sumco USA (formerly Sumitomo) Silicon Graphics Solectron TiVo VA Software (Slashdot) VeriSign Veritas Software (acquired by Symantec) VMware (acquired by EMC)

Befitting its heritage, Silicon Valley is home to the high-tech superstore chain Fry's Electronics.

For a larger list of companies, see Category:Companies based in the Silicon Valley

Universities

Carnegie Mellon University (West Coast Campus) San José State University Santa Clara University Stanford University National University (San Jose Campus)

Technically the following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but have been instrumental as sources of research and new graduates:

University of California, Berkeley California State University, East Bay University of California, Davis University of California, Santa Cruz Monterey Institute of International Studies - Fisher Graduate School of International Business

Cities

A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

Campbell Cupertino East Palo Alto Gilroy Los Altos Los Altos Hills Los Gatos Menlo Park Mountain View Milpitas Palo Alto Redwood City San Jose Santa Clara Saratoga Sunnyvale

Cities sometimes associated with the region:

Fremont Newark Santa Cruz Union City

Trivia

In the James Bond film A View to a Kill, Villain Max Zorin plans to destroy Silicon Valley by detonating explosives between the Hayward Fault and San Andreas Fault causing them to flood.

Further reading

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1984) Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era, Dennis Hayes, London: Free Association Books (1989) Silicon Valley, Inc.: Ruminations on the Demise of a Unique Culture, The San Jose Mercury News (1997) Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. English-Lueck, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002) The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press (2003) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff, Viking (2005) Silicon Follies: A Dot.Comedy, Thomas Scoville, Pocket Books (2000) The Silicon Boys: And Their Valleys Of Dreams, David A. Kaplan, Harper Perinneal (April 2000), ISBN 0-688-17906-1 Cities of knowledge: Cold War science and the search for the next Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (2005)