A Brief Professional Biography of Robert Noyce

Robert Norton Noyce was born in Burlington, Iowa, in December 1927, the third of four sons of a Congregationalist minister and his dynamic wife. Noyce graduated Grinnell College with a double major in Math and Physics in 1949 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1953.

After almost three years in the transistor research group at Philco, Noyce moved, in 1956, to the San Francisco Bay Area. He was drawn to the region that would come to be called “ Silicon Valley” by the opportunity to work for the brilliant Nobel prizewinning physicist William Shockley. In September 1957, Noyce and seven other Shockley employees, frustrated by the challenges of working for the mercurial Shockley, decamped to start their own firm to build silicon-based transistors. This move, which launched Fairchild Semiconductor, is often cited as the first in the chain of events that launched Silicon Valley.

From childhood, Noyce had built, invented, and tinkered. Over the course of his life, he was awarded seventeen patents for semiconductor devices and structures. His most famous invention came in 1959, when he conceived the first practical integrated circuit while heading Research and Development at Fairchild Semiconductor. An integrated circuit is a complete electronic circuit built on a chip of silicon small enough to be carried off by an ant – and nearly every piece of electronics on the market today has at its heart a device very similar to the one for which Noyce holds the patent.

Noyce disliked hierarchy. At a time when most companies had executive dining rooms and limousines for the CEO, Noyce wanted his companies to blur distinctions between management and workers. He wanted to offer stock options to all employees and to have the entire company eat in a single no-frills cafeteria. He did not allow designated executive parking spaces (much less limousines) and was a pioneer in the flat organizational structures that are today a hallmark of many American high-technology firms.

In 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore, another member of the group of eight that started Fairchild Semiconductor, decided to launch another startup company. Today that firm is called Intel, the largest semiconductor company in the world. Noyce led Intel for seven years as president and another fifteen as a director.

The late-1970s marked the opening of a new phase of Noyce’s career – one spent not in the service of any specific company, but in the service of the industry itself. Throughout the 1980s, the American semiconductor industry found its worldwide supremacy challenged – and nearly toppled – for the first time. The challengers were Japanese firms, and leading the American response became the defining animus of Noyce’s work.

During these years Noyce also turned his attention to strengthening the network that had nurtured his early career. Beginnings fascinated Noyce, and he loved nothing more than to sit with a group of young engineers and scientists, listening to their ideas and offering his own. Out of his sizable fortune, he helped to fund several young technology companies as a private “angel investor,” and he served as a mentor and role model to dozens of entrepreneurs.

In 1988, Noyce became the founding CEO of SEMATECH, a semiconductor manufacturing consortium jointly staffed and funded by fourteen semiconductor companies and the Department of Defense. He led SEMATECH until June 3, 1990, when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 62.