The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

by Leslie Berlin

Book Overview

Hailed as the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce was a brilliant inventor, a leading entrepreneur, and a daring risk taker who piloted his own jets and skied mountains accessible only by helicopter. Now, in The Man Behind the Microchip, Leslie Berlin captures not only this colorful individual but also the vibrant interplay of technology, business, money, politics, and culture that defines Silicon Valley.
Here is the life...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019531199X
• ISBN13: 9780195311990
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.2" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

a vanished Silicon Valley

Berlin has performed an amazing amount of detailed research into Noyce's life. She takes us back to the years when the semiconductor industry was born, and shows us how Noyce helped make it flourish in Silicon Valley. A striking passage describes how Noyce anticipated the observation of negative differential resistance in a tunnel diode. Some 18 months before Leo Esaki in Tokyo discovered it. Esaki would win the Nobel in Physics for his work. In one of these what-ifs, Noyce could easily have taken that for himself. By the way, the book's explanation of negative resistance is a trifle awkward. The quantum mechanical phenomenon cannot be easily explained to a general audience. (As a grad student, I had the same problem of discussing this about my research, to laymen.) But if it puzzles you, remember that it also eluded a lot of people in the 1950s. You might already be familiar with the broad outlines of how Noyce, Moore and others worked for Robert Shockley, and then left en masse in disgust at his management style. But Berlin furnishes here far more detail than is commonly known. About how Noyce agonised and reluctantly left Shockley. Likewise, with the later tale of Fairchild Semiconductor and how Noyce and Moore would in turn leave that. This time to found Intel (with Grove). Berlin gives much more detail on this broad outline, that explains the motivations of Noyce and his associates. Some readers might be amused to see that the CEO of Fairchild resisted handing out stock options to employees, in the grounds that this was "creeping socialism". Which played no small part in the exodus of its best people. The book describes a Silicon Valley that has vanished.

Thoroughly insightful

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Noyce on a couple of occasions in the 80's. While he seemed tired and distracted, he still took time to meet with groups of students (including me) to discuss what he thought about the future of American high-tech industry. This was before his involvement with Sematech, but the problems that entity were to confront were clearly already on his mind. Since that time, I have been interested in the anthropology of Silicon Valley - the distinct organizational cultures that were developing there - so I am pleased to see Noyce, Moore, et al. get some credit for their roles in this in Ms. Berlin's very fine book. I encourage anyone with an interest in organizational development or the management of productive people to read this book.

Outstanding biography of Robert Noyce and his impact on current technology

As one of the thousands of young engineers who made the great migration to the Bay Area almost 50 years ago, I really enjoyed reading Ms. Berlin's biography of Robert Noyce and her wide ranging narrative of the early days of Silicon Valley. I found her account of the founding companies and major players, not only very informative, but also an absorbing story of an evolving technology. I was of course, familiar with Noyce's achievements in the development of the microchip, but there was much about the man, his character and personality and the details of his work that was a revelation to me. Being an electronic system designer in the early 60's, I was also oppressed by the "tyranny of numbers" that was becoming more difficult to deal with as systems became larger and more complex over time. I was involved with a number of efforts to defeat the tyranny by the use of various discrete construction techniques. They were all bound to fail since they could do little to minimize the connectivity problem. The appearance of the microchip on the electronic scene was a true revolution that ultimately made possible the wonders we take for granted, from the powerful little computer on which I'm typing this, to the tiny programmable DSP (digital signal processor) hearing aid I wear. We all owe a great debt to Robert Noyce, who would have shared the Noble Prize in Physics with Jack Kilby had he lived another 10 years. As I write this, memorials for Jack Kilby, who died less than a week ago, are being held world wide. Another giant has fallen! I highly recommend Leslie Berlin's book, which is far more than just a biography of an individual, notwithstanding one as compelling as Noyce. It's also an edifying history of a technology and industry, cleverly disguised as a darned good read. I agree with the previous reviewer, a Pulitzer for Ms. Berlin!

Excellent biography of THE man and early valley history

I have read many histories of Silicon Valley including those that focused on chips, personal computers, venture capitalists etcetera, but this one is the best. While there is little here specifically about the rise of personal computers this book fills in a tremendous amount of the early history of the development of the chip, while also providing a very revealing portrait of Robert Noyce. The range of information here is very great. However, the book is focused on Noyce, its just that it sheds light on a great number of events that are part of the Silicon Valley lore. Leslie Berlin has done a very thorough job here. Robert Noyce was the subject of her Phd and she has been a visiting scholar at Stanford while writing this book. The book has a full set of notes so that the information she is revealing can be traced back to the sources she has used. She has clearly had substantial help from Robert Noyce's family as there are a number of elements of this story that could only come from them. It appears that she has interviewed a large number of Noyce's colleagues including people like Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, and Charlie Sporck and has pretty much gone through almost everything written by Robert Noyce or about him. There is a list of about 10 Theses she references and references to each of Robert Noyce's testimonies before congress. Ms Berlin has even interviewed the women who had affairs with Robert Noyce. The small town background of Mr Noyce has been written about before. However, it is clear that the entire family was very well educated going back a couple generations. It is revealed that Bob's older brothers also set a strong pace as they were salutorian and Valadictorians of their class in high school. One of Bob's older brothers ended up becoming a professor of Chemistry at Berkeley. It is clear that Bob was able to have a fairly normal social life at Grinell while amassing a record strong enough to gain admission to MITs physics graduate school. Clearly Noyce's interest in the transistor started early as he and his Physics professor were beating their way through Bell technical reports to understand this work. (probably the reports that were enshrined in Shockley's 1955 book on semiconductors) As Ms Berlin makes clear, Noyce struggled a little bit at MIT, having to do some remedial work to fill in holes in his background. Not surprising since he came from a program with 2 physics professors. However, apparrently one of his fellow students, went to one of the faculty members on his behalf and without telling Noyce to ask them to give him more financial aid as he considered Noyce one of the two smartest guys in the physics grad program. (the other is revealed to be Gell-Mann, not bad company) Clearly the faculty agreed to some extent as after a year he was given a fellowship. Not bad to go from struggling to a fellowship in a year in pretty fast company. Ms Berlin also discusses Noyce's thesis in a bit of