Noyce, Robert

views updated May 17 2018

NOYCE, ROBERT

Robert Noyce was one of the giants of 20th century high-tech science and the multi-billion dollar business it spawned. Along with 15 other patents, he was a co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a device former National Science Foundation Director Erich Bloch called "the key invention of the 20th century." In addition to his contributions to computer technology, Noyce co-founded two of the most influential companies in the computer industry, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Those companies in large measure established the region around Palo Alto and San Jose, California—now universally known as Silicon Valley—as the premier area for computer research, development, and manufacture; and earned Noyce the nickname "the Mayor of Silicon Valley." For the last decade of his life, Noyce was an outspoken advocate of the American microprocessor and computer industry and actively lobbied in Washington for measures that would protect American companies from the threat of unfair Japanese competition. He died in 1990.

EARLY LIFE

Robert Norton Noyce was born in Burlington Iowa on December 12, 1927. He grew up, the son of a Congregationalist minister, in nearby Grinnell, Iowa. As a boy he tinkered with machines and chemistry; in later life he identified his origins as the roots of his inventiveness. "In a small town," he told writer Tom Wolfe, "when something breaks down, you don't wait around for a new part, because it's not coming. You make it yourself." In 1948, while Noyce was studying at Grinnell College, his physics teacher, Grant Gale, obtained two of the first transistors in the world, and began teaching the first college class in solid state electronics anywhere. Noyce was captivated by the subject, and went on to do Ph.D. work on it at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With degree in hand in 1953, Noyce went to work for vacuum tube maker Philco Corp. for three years. He finally left to join Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, where William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, was pursuing cutting-edge research on four-layer diodes. Although Noyce acknowledged Shockley as the "guru, after whom the disciples. . .followed," the Nobel Prize winner was both difficult to work with and had different ideas than Noyce and others about the most promising directions for research.

In 1957, Noyce and seven colleagues, left Shock-ley's company. With the assistance of venture capitalist Arthur Rock and funding from the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company, they founded a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The "Gang of Eight" set up shop in an old warehouse in Mountain View, down the road from Shockley's lab. It was a time of growing interest in transistors for consumer goods; government interest in research was driven by the Soviet's launch of Sputnik. In that climate, Fairchild was poised for great things. One of Noyce's first projects was to develop a simple means around the complicated wiring together of individual transistors. Noyce's idea was to put all the transistors onto a single piece of silicon without any wires. The result was the first silicon integrated circuit in mid-1959. It came just months after Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby invented one. After a protracted patent battle, the two men were recognized as co-inventors. The integrated circuit was a key technology that made possible other inventions ranging from the pocket calculator to the onboard computers used by NASA in their moon shots.

INTEL TAKES SHAPE

Noyce was named Fairchild's General Manager in 1959, and under his leadership the firm's sales rose from less than $10,000 a year to over $130 billion in 1968. By then, Noyce was ready to form his own company. With Gordon Moore, another Shockley defector, and venture capitalist Arthur Rock, Noyce founded Intel Corporation, the firm that almost single-handedly made possible the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 1970s, working on the relatively neglected area of computer memory, Noyce, Moore, and Intel developed a string of innovations: the 1103 memory chip; the 4004 CPU chip, considered the world's first microprocessor; the 8080, the first 8-bit microprocessor; the 8086, a 16-bit microprocessor.

It was also at Intel that a genius for business that equaled his genius for electronics came into full flower. Already developed at Fairchild, he established a company culture he called a "meritocracy," in which there was virtually no traditional hierarchy, no executive parking spots, and no isolated offices. Researchers were given nearly complete autonomy over their projects. At Intel Noyce established the stock option, rather than profit-sharing, as a means of fostering a spirit of innovation among employees. Perhaps because of his roots in the Congregational faith, Noyce insisted on completely ethical business practices at Intel. Of this achievement Tom Wolfe has written: "Noyce managed to create an ethical universe within an inherently amoral setting: the American business corporation in the second half of the twentieth century."

PURSUING BROADER GOALS

During the 1980s, Noyce turned to lobbying, urging Washington to take steps to protect the American computer industry from unfair foreign competition, especially from Japan, which was closing its market to American computer products while dumping its goods below cost in the United States. Noyce helped found the Semiconductor Industry Association and served as its first president. In 1988 he agreed to move to Austin Texas to head Semtech, a research consortium of fourteen semiconductor companies established to narrow the gap between the semiconductor manufacturing technology in the U.S.A. and Japan. He continued to work at forging partnerships between the government and the computer industry, activities that were controversial and of only limited success in his lifetime. By April 1990 he had begun to withdraw from running Semtech's day-to-day operations.

RECOGNITION OF ACHIEVEMENTS

Robert Noyce won every major honor in his field, short of the Nobel Prize. He received the AEA Medal of Achievement in 1974, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1978, the I.E.E. Faraday Medal in 1979, the National Medal of Science in 1980, and the National Medal of Technology in 1987. He was a co-recipient of the AFIPS Harry Goode Award for leadership in computer science, the Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Cledo Brunetti Award of the IEEE for inventing the integrated circuit, and the National Academy of Engineering's first Charles Stark Draper Prize. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983 and the U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1989.

Robert Noyce married Elizabeth Bottomley in 1953. They had four children together, and were divorced in 1974. Later in 1974 Noyce married Ann Bowers. Active all his life, Noyce was an avid swimmer, skier, hang glider, and pilot. He died suddenly of a heart attack on June 3, 1990 at his home in Austin Texas.

Noyce, Robert Norton

views updated Jun 08 2018

NOYCE, Robert Norton

(b. 12 December 1927 in Burlington, Iowa; d. 3 June 1990 in Austin, Texas), inventor of the silicon computer chip, cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and originator of a decentralized management style that ultimately became the dominant corporate culture of Silicon Valley.

Noyce was the third of four sons, all high academic achievers, of Ralph Noyce, Sr., a Congregationalist minister, and Harriett Norton. He did not leave home until he started graduate work. He went to Grinnell College, where his most outrageous act was stealing a pig in order to have a barbecue. (He called the farmer the next day to confess the crime, and his honesty nearly earned him an expulsion from school.) Noyce graduated with a B.A. in physics in 1949. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he gained his Ph.D. in physical electronics in 1953. He began his professional career with the Philco Corporation, where he designed better ways of etching germanium crystals, the basis for early transistors.

After three years Noyce applied for a position at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. So confident was he that he would get the job, a story alleges, he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, and made a down-payment on the house where they would live before he even had his job interview. But Noyce would not stay at Shockley for long: the company, one of the pioneers of the transistor, was committed to germanium as the basis of transistor technology, while Noyce and a number of his colleagues had become convinced that silicon held the key to all future semiconductor development.

A natural leader, Noyce in 1957 was asked to head a group of eight Shockley engineers in the creation of a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, which would make silicon transistors. Wiring such tiny components was expensive, especially when working with silicon, so late in 1958 Noyce and Gordon E. Moore began working on a cluster of transistors, all laid down on a single chip. A few months later, however, the engineers at Fairchild were shocked to see Jack Kirby of Texas Instruments announce the creation of a similar "integrated circuit," based on the traditional germanium. Within weeks Noyce, Moore, and Jean Hoerni, another of what Shockley called the "traitorous eight," had worked out a planar production process that allowed Fairchild to take its silicon-based integrated circuits to market first. Ultimately, the race was decided at the U.S. Patent Office, which awarded Noyce and Fairchild Patent #2,981,877 for the planar silicon chip, but gave Kirby and Texas Instruments Patent #3,138,743 for the miniaturized electronic circuit; the companies finally settled their decade-long dispute with a cross-licensing agreement in the summer of 1966. Royalties paid to the two companies had already reached $100 million by the early 1980s. Noyce eventually recorded a dozen important patents in his name.

In 1959 Fairchild Camera, which had put up the original money for Noyce and his colleagues to incorporate, exercised its option to buy the company outright, although they kept Noyce as general manager. Noyce and his friends were now wealthy men. By 1968 Fairchild Semiconductor had yearly sales of some $130 million and had grown from twelve employees to twelve thousand. But it never lost the management style that Noyce created for it from the start: open, egalitarian, with complete responsibility and complete autonomy (balanced by complete accountability) for all employees. It was Noyce, at Fairchild Semiconductor, who created the corporate culture that has characterized the entirety of Silicon Valley ever since.

By 1968 Noyce was casting around for new worlds to conquer, and he found it in the quest for a large-scale integrated circuit, or LSI. But Fairchild was too cumber-some an entity to pursue such a visionary goal; therefore, Noyce, along with Moore and Arthur Grove, who had joined Fairchild in 1963, decided to found yet another startup semiconductor company. The self-effacing Nocye and Moore rejected their initial name for the company, N M Electronics, in favor of the less-boastful Integrated Electronics, immediately shortened to Intel. To demonstrate their seriousness, each man put the $250,000 he had received from the sale of Fairchild Semiconductor nine years before into the start-up costs of the new business. They also allowed Grinnell College, Noyce's alma mater, to invest an equal amount, an investment that would prove a wise one for the small Iowa school.

Noyce's first great accomplishment at Intel was the creation of the 1103 memory chip, which fit four thousand transistors into the same space as two lowercase Ms (mm) would occupy on this page. It could do the work of a thousand industry-standard memory cores, and do it faster. Intel grew from about $3,000 in revenues in 1969 to $23.4 million in 1972, and to $66 million the next year, continuing its exponential growth for many years thereafter. During this period Ted Hoff, one of Noyce's researchers, discovered how to transform each chip into a computer, or "micro-processor." The result was a series of microcomputer chips that have become the standards of the industry, from 1974's 8080 chip, with 4,500 transistors running at two megahertz, to 2002's Pentium 4 chip, with fifty-five million transistors running at two gigahertz (gigahertz is 1,000 times the speed of megahertz).

Noyce's other great accomplishment was his "councils," as he called them, in which staff members from every division would meet to resolve the kinds of divisional conflicts that paralyzed companies relying on a more formal management structure. In the 1990s, when Japanese "quality circles" were introduced into the United States, observers discovered that Intel had been applying this methodology all along.

Noyce retired from day-to-day operations at Intel in 1975, and in 1978 agreed to become head of the Semiconductor Industry Association. In 1988 he became president of SEMATECH (SE miconductor MA nufacturing TECH nology), an industry-government consortium, and moved to Austin, Texas. He served on the board of trustees at Grinnell from 1962 until his death, and on the University of California board of regents from 1982 on. His awards included the National Medal of Science, and medals from the Franklin Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the American Federation of Information Processing Societies.

Noyce met Elizabeth Bottomley in 1953, just after he had completed his Ph.D., and married her that fall. They had four children, but divorced in 1974, and Noyce married Ann Bowers, Intel's personnel director, the next year. A champion diver in college, Noyce was an avid hang glider, pilot, and skier. Ironically, all his physical activity could not save him from a fatal heart attack at the age of sixty-two.

Noyce was a skilled engineer, a successful entrepreneur, and the most charismatic leader the semiconductor industry has had. Most people would be content with fame gained in a single field, but Noyce is remembered as the coinventor of the integrated circuit and creator of the silicon micro-chip as well as the creator of an innovative—and wildly successful—management style at the two companies he cofounded, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.

Biographical information on Noyce appears in T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (1984). A profile by a distinguished colleague is Gordon E. Moore, "Robert N. Noyce," National Academy of Engineering Memorial Tributes 6 (1993): 154–159. Also notable is Tom Wolfe, "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce," Esquire (Dec. 1983): 346–374. An obituary is in the New York Times (4 June 1990).

Hartley S. Spatt

Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s

Robert Noyce

views updated May 29 2018

Robert Noyce

Robert Norton Noyce (1927-1990) coinvented the integrated circuit, an electronic component which is considered to be among the twentieth century's most significant technological developments.

The laptop computer, the ignition control in a modern automobile, the "brain" of a VCR that allows for its programming, and thousands of other computing devices all depend for their operation on the integrated circuit that Robert Noyce coinvented. He was not only a brilliant inventor, credited with more than a dozen patents for semiconductor devices and processes, but a forceful businessman who founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation and the Intel Corporation and who, at the time of his death, was president and CEO of Sematech.

Robert Norton Noyce was born December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa, the third of four boys in the family. His parents were Ralph Noyce, a minister who worked for the Iowa Conference of Congregational Churches, and Harriet Norton Noyce. Growing up in a two-story church-owned house in Grinnell, a small town in central Iowa, Noyce was gifted in many areas, excelling in sports, music, and acting as well as academic work. He exhibited a talent for math and science while in high school and took the Grinnell college freshman physics course in his senior year. Noyce went on to receive his baccalaureate degree in physics from Grinnell, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1949. It was at Grinnell that he was introduced to the transistor (an electronic device that allows a small current to control a larger one in another location) by his mentor Grant Gale, head of Grinnell's physics department. Noyce was excited by the invention, seeing it as freeing electronics from the constraints of the bulky and inefficient vacuum tube. After he received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954, Noyce—who had no interest in pure research—started working for Philco in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the company was making semiconductors (materials whose conductivity of an electrical current puts them midway between conductors and insulators).

After three years, Noyce became convinced Philco did not have as much interest in transistors as he did. By chance in 1956 he was asked by William Shockley, Nobel laureate and coinventor of the transistor, to come work for him in California. Excited by the opportunity to develop state-of the-art transistor technology, Noyce moved to Palo Alto, which is located in an area that came to be known as Silicon Valley (named for the silicon compounds used in the manufacture of computer chips). But Noyce was no happier with Shockley than he had been with Philco; both Shockley's management style and the direction of his work—which ignored transistors—were disappointing. In 1957 Noyce left with seven other Shockley engineers to form a new company, financed by Fairchild Camera and Instrument, to be called Fairchild Semiconductor. At age twenty-nine, Noyce was chosen as the new corporation's leader.

The first important development during the early years at Fairchild was the 1958 invention, by Jean Hoerni (an ex-Shockley scientist), of a process to protect the elements on a transistor from contaminants during manufacturing. This was called the planar process, and involved laying down a layer of silicon oxide over the transistor's elements. In 1959, after prodding from one of his patent attorneys to find more applications for the planar process, Noyce took the next step of putting several electronic components, such as resistors and transistors, on the same chip and layering them over with silicon oxide. Combining components in this fashion eliminated the need to wire individual transistors to each other and made possible tremendous reductions in the size of circuit components with a corresponding increase in the speed of their operation. The integrated circuit, or microchip as it became commonly known, had been born. More than one person, however, was working toward this invention at the same time. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had devised an integrated circuit the year before, but it had no commercial application. Nevertheless, both Kilby and Noyce are considered coinventors of the integrated circuit. In 1959 Noyce applied for a semiconductor integrated circuit patent using his process, which was awarded in 1961.

Both technological advances and competition in the new microchip industry increased rapidly. The number of transistors that could be put on a microchip grew from ten in 1964 to one thousand in 1969 to thirty-two thousand in 1975. (By 1993 up to 3.1 million transistors could be put on a 2.15-inch-square microprocessor chip.) The number of manufacturers eventually grew from two (Fairchild and Shockley) to dozens. During the 1960s Noyce's company was the leading producer of microchips, and by 1968 he was a millionaire. However, Noyce still felt constricted at Fairchild; he wanted more control and so—along with Gordon Moore (also a former Shockley employee)—he formed Intel in Santa Clara, California. Intel went to work making semiconductor memory, or data storage. Subsequently, Ted Hoff, an Intel scientist, invented the microprocessor and propelled Intel into the forefront of the industry. By 1982 Intel could claim to have pioneered three-quarters of the previous decade's advances in microtechnology.

Noyce's management style could be called "roll up your sleeves." He shunned fancy corporate cars, offices, and furnishings in favor of a less-structured, relaxed working environment in which everyone contributed and no one benefited from lavish perquisites. Becoming chairman of the board of Intel in 1974, he left the work of daily operations behind him, founding and later becoming chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association. In 1980 Noyce was honored with the National Medal of Science and in 1983, the same year that Intel's sales reached one billion dollars, he was made a member of the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. He was dubbed the Mayor of Silicon Valley during the 1980s, not only for his scientific contributions but also for his role as a spokesperson for the industry. Noyce spent much of his later career working to improve the international competitiveness of American industry. Early on he recognized the strengths of foreign competitors in the electronics market and the corresponding weaknesses of domestic companies. In 1988 Noyce took charge of Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers working together and with the United States government to increase U.S. competitiveness in the world marketplace.

Noyce was married twice. His first marriage to Elizabeth Bottomley ended in divorce (which he attributed to his intense involvement in his work); the couple had four children together. In 1975 he married Ann Bowers, who was then Intel's personnel director. Noyce enjoyed reading Hemingway, flying his own airplane, hang gliding, and scuba diving. He believed that microelectronics would continue to advance in complexity and sophistication well beyond its current state, leading to the question of what use society would make of the technology. Noyce died on June 3, 1990, of a sudden heart attack.