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