Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
Robert Norton Noyce (1927–1990), nicknamed ‘the Mayor of Silicon Valley’, was an American physicist and entrepreneur. He grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, graduated from Grinnell College in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics and received his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1953. He worked as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia, joined William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in 1956 and left a year later with the ‘traitorous eight’ to co-found Fairchild Semiconductor.
After Kilby had demonstrated the first integrated circuit in 1958, a germanium chip with external wire connections, Noyce independently invented a new type of integrated circuit in 1959: the monolithic integrated circuit (German: monolithischer Schaltkreis). Noyce’s design was made of silicon, whereas Kilby’s chip was made of germanium. Kilby’s circuit had external wire connections and could not be mass-produced; Noyce’s chip put all components on a chip of silicon and connected them with aluminium lines. It was based on the planar process that Jean Hoerni had developed at Fairchild. In July 1959 Noyce filed US patent 2,981,877, ‘Semiconductor device-and-lead structure’. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1978 ‘for his contributions to the silicon integrated circuit, a cornerstone of modern electronics’.
In 1968 Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor and founded Intel. Noyce was its first chief executive officer, until 1975. As chief executive he supported the development of the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Noyce died on 3 June 1990 in Austin, Texas.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Noyce
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0, Intel Free Press)
