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Silicon Valley

 
Dictionary: Sil·i·con Valley   (sĭl'ĭ-kən, -kŏn') pronunciation
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A region of western California southeast of San Francisco known for its high-technology design and manufacturing industries.

 

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Modern Science: Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley

Region on the San Francisco Peninsula in California where the miniaturized electronics industry is centered, so called because most of the devices built there are made of semiconductors such as silicon.

• The term is often used as a catchword to describe the development of high-tech industry: “If we can attract this corporation to our town, we could become another Silicon Valley.”

Investment Dictionary: Silicon Valley
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Nickname for the region in North California (around San Jose) that contains a huge concentration of computer and internet companies.

Investopedia Says:
In case you were wondering, silicon is the semiconductor material used to produce the computer chips that have made the internet possible.


Business Dictionary: Silicon Valley
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Area in California where a significant amount of high-tech research is conducted. Silicon is a component in advanced computer chips.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Silicon Valley
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Industrial region, west-central California. Roughly bounded by San Francisco Bay on the north, the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west, and the Diablo Range on the east, it takes its (unofficial) name from the extensive use of silicon in the region's electronics industries. The U.S. government invested heavily in the region's industry following World War II. A second economic surge occurred with the proliferation of personal computers in the 1980s, and a third surge followed the growth of the Internet in the 1990s.

For more information on Silicon Valley, visit Britannica.com.

US History Encyclopedia: Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley, located around Santa Clara and San Jose, California, is the home of many key U.S. corporations that specialize in advanced electronic and information technologies. First called "Silicon Valley" in 1971 by a local newsletter writer, Donald C. Hoefler, the "Valley" became the center of newly developing technologies that many believed would revolutionize computers, telecommunications, manufacturing procedures, warfare, and even U.S. society itself. The name came to symbolize a type of high-risk business characterized by rapid success or failure, extensive job mobility, and informal behavior, traits thought by some to be the wave of the future. The location of such high-tech research, development, and manufacturing in a formerly agricultural area—once known as the "prune capital of America"—grew mainly from its proximity to Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. Stanford, a research-oriented institution with active departments in engineering and electronics, decided in 1951 to establish a "research park," a place where companies could build facilities and conduct research in cooperation with the university, the first such enterprise in the country.

If there was a single founder of Silicon Valley it was William Shockley, an English-born physicist who worked on early concepts of the transistor at Bell Laboratories before World War II and who went on to become the director of Bell's Transistor Physics Research Group. A restless person whose inquisitive mind and entrepreneurial aspirations did not find satisfaction in the larger corporation, he became a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1954. The following year he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories just south of Palo Alto in the north end of Silicon Valley. Shockley's business acumen did not equal his skills in science and engineering, however, and in 1957 eight of his engineers defected to create Fairchild Semiconductor, supported by Fairchild Camera and Instrument.

Their departure established a pattern of job mobility that came to characterize careers in Silicon Valley in particular and in the electronics companies in general, with employees shunning ties of corporate loyalty in favor of personal fulfillment and financial reward. Reinforcingthis pattern, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 to establish Intel. Another Fairchild employee, W. J. Sanders III, founded Advanced Micro Devices soon thereafter. In the early 1970s one survey found forty-one companies in Silicon Valley headed by former Fairchild employees. This pattern continued into the 1980s with such companies as National Semiconductor, Atari, Apple Computer, LSI Logic, and Cypress Semiconductor having all or part of their origins in Silicon Valley.

To many observers the California location was central to the success and, later, the problems of Silicon Valley. The popular image of California, with its promise of individual and professional renewal, played a part, as did the cultural climate of the 1960s, which criticized large organizations for suppressing personal expression. The moderate climate of Silicon Valley, combined with a pool of educated talent from California universities and a largely nonunion workforce, attracted investors and corporations alike. Publicity about Silicon Valley in the 1970s generated discussion about new opportunities for U.S. industry, especially in electronics. In this respect the Valley represented a significant demographic change in American society: a shift in political and economic power from the older industrialized Northeast and Midwest to the Pacific Coast. The rise of Silicon Valley occurred at a time when major changes in financial markets and the availability of capital were affecting many established electronics companies.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, much of the valley relied on military contracts, but this dependence declined as commercial and then personal markets for computers emerged. Investors hoping for a very high rate of return increasingly were willing to risk supporting the new electronics companies even though as many as 25 percent of them failed within a few years. Demand for capital increased as the size of electronic components, such as memory chips, decreased. Hand in hand with smaller components developed the need for more sophisticated and costly technologies in manufacturing. By the late 1980s companies estimated that they needed as much as $1 billion to establish a manufacturing facility for the latest generation of Semiconductors. Observers of investment practices and corporate strategies began to worry that this reliance on venture capital had created a pattern in U.S. business that stressed short-term profits rather than longer-term concerns about product development and competition from foreign corporations. Silicon Valley's success and the boost it gave to California's image and economy led such states as Oregon, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, New York, and Minnesota to invite or promote advanced electronic firms. In the 1990s, however, companies in Silicon Valley remained the major indicator of the health of the industry.

Products such as memory and logic chips, micro-processors, and custom-made circuits are expensive to manufacture, subject to price-cutting in the market, and have a short product life (sometimes two years or less) before the next generation appears. Their sale depends on the health of important segments of U.S. industry, including computers, telecommunications systems, automobiles, and military contractors. Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere in the United States thus are subject to cycles of boom and bust. The latter occurred in 1984–1986, when many of the valley's companies found themselves with surplus products after a drop in the U.S. personal computer market. Companies had to lay off workers and some went out of business.

Foreign competition, especially from Japan, caused perhaps the greatest problems for Silicon Valley. Business and political leaders debated whether or not trade policy needed to defend the interests of U.S. electronics firms more aggressively and whether U.S. companies should receive government funding to make them more competitive in the international market. Silicon Valley had begun to worry about Japanese competition by the late 1970s. In 1981, U.S. companies controlled 51.4 percent of the world's semiconductor market; Japan's share was 35.5 percent. Within seven years the figures had virtually reversed themselves, with Japan at 51 percent and the United States 36.5 percent. U.S. companies charged their Japanese counterparts with dumping semiconductors onto the U.S. market at low prices to undercut U.S. manufacturers while Japan kept much of its home market closed. The Semiconductor Industry Association, which represented many companies in Silicon Valley, urged bilateral agreements to open Japan's market. The first of these was signed in 1986, and a second followed in 1992. By the early 1990s it appeared that U.S. industry had started to recover some of the ground lost to Japan. A boom cycle began in the mid-1990s with the emergence of the Internet and Electronic Commerce, sending technology stocks skyward and leading to the rapid rise of new businesses in the software and electronics industries.

Several factors reduced the lure of Silicon Valley as the center of the electronics and computer industry, among them new technologies, the ascent of successful electronic-component manufacturing elsewhere in the United States, and foreign competition. People learned that the manufacturing of electronic components was not as environ-mentally clean or safe as some thought, and the growth of the Valley led to traffic congestion and air pollution. Silicon Valley remained a center of research, development, and manufacturing in the electronics industry, however, and the rise of the Internet-based "dot.coms" of the mid-and late 1990s reenergized the area's symbolic role as a frontier of industrial and social organization and sent property values soaring. When technology stocks began to implode in early 2001, however, massive layoffs swept through Silicon Valley, again casting a shadow over the the area's immediate future and underlining the region's dependence on a sector of the economy that seems to be particularly susceptible to boom-and-bust cycles.

Bibliography

Findlay, John M. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Forester, Tom. High-Tech Society: The Story of the Information Technology Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.

Saxby, Stephen. The Age of Information: The Past Development and Future Significance of Computing and Communications. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Teitelman, Robert. Profits of Science: The American Marriage of Business and Technology. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley, an industrial region, approximately 20 mi (32 km) long, in the Santa Clara Valley between Palo Alto and San Jose, mainly in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, W central Calif., where many computer manufacturing and design companies are located. Computer-software and other high-technology industries are also there. The name derives from high-purity silicon used in making the semiconductors used in computers.

Wikipedia: Silicon Valley
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For the valley nicknamed "Silicone Valley" see San Fernando Valley, (notice the difference in spelling of Silicon vs Silicone). For the videogame see Space Station Silicon Valley.
A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley"

Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of engineers and venture capitalists. Geographically, Silicon Valley encompasses the northern part of the Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities.

Contents

Origin of the term

The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Central California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to Don Hoefler, a friend of Vaerst's, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley USA," began in the paper's issue dated January 11, 1971.[1] Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semiconductor (silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially) and computer industries that were concentrated in the area. These firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.

History

"Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley's past and present is the drive to "play" with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channeled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today."[2]

Looking west over northern San Jose (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley

Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to a vibrant, growing electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the evolution of this area.[3]

Social Roots of information technology revolution in America

It was in Silicon Valley that the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed, and has been the site of electronic innovation for over four decades, sustained by about a quarter of a million information technology workers. Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with the Defense Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University.[4]

Roots in radio and military technology

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of U.S. Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the U.S. Navy in 1912.[2]

In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California, was commissioned by the United States Government for use as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to house the airship USS Macon in Hangar One. The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field, and between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here.[5] A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its West Coast operations to San Diego, NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA) took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms such as Lockheed.

Stanford Industrial Park

After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students, Frederick Terman proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park, named the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found venture capital for civilian technology start-ups . One of the major success stories was Hewlett-Packard. Founded in Packard's garage by Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953. In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home printing market when it released the first ink jet printer in 1984. In addition, the tenancy of Eastman Kodak and General Electric made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1990s.[6][7]

Silicon transistor

In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.[8]

Venture capital firms

By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.

The rise of software

Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers.

While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel.[9] Microsoft's Windows GUI is based on Apple's work, more or less directly.[10] Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.

Internet bubble

Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.

Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley.[11] San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.[12]

Economy

According to a 2008- study by AeA in 2006 Silicon Valley was the third largest (cybercity) high-tech center in the United States, behind the New York metropolitan area and Washington metropolitan area, with 225,300 high-tech jobs. The Bay Area as a whole however, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first with 386,000 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers.

The Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary at $144,800. The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States.[13] The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009, up from 7.8% in the previous month.[14]

Notable companies

See also: Category:Companies based in Silicon Valley

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:

Adobe Systems
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Apple Inc.
eBay
Google
Hewlett-Packard
Intel
Intuit
Nvidia
Oracle
VMware
Yahoo!

Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):

Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech superstore retail chain Fry's Electronics.

Notable government facilities

Universities

Cities

A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

Cities sometimes associated with the region:

See also

Portal.svg San Francisco Bay Area portal

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Don Hoefler profile from NetValley.com
  2. ^ a b Timothy J. Sturgeon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Timothy J. Sturgeon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology SV GlobalizationPDF (90.0 KiB)
  3. ^ Markoff, John (2009-04-17). "Searching for Silicon Valley". New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/travel/escapes/17Amer.html?pagewanted=1. Retrieved 2009-04-17. 
  4. ^ The Information Technology Revolution by Marvel Castells (On the history of formation of Silicon Valley by Rogers and Larsen 1984 and Malone 1985)
  5. ^ moffettfieldmuseum
  6. ^ 1984 printer
  7. ^ SV History
  8. ^ Goodheart July 2, 2006
  9. ^ Graphical User Interface (GUI) from apple-history.com
  10. ^ Inventors of the Modern Computer: The History of the Graphical User Interface or GUI - The Apple Lisa by Mary Bellis
  11. ^ Reed Albergotti, "The Most Inventive Towns in America," Wall Street Journal, 22-23 July 2006, P1.
  12. ^ Ibid.
  13. ^ Silicon Valley and N.Y. still top tech rankings
  14. ^ Silicon Valley unemployment rate jumps to 9.4 percent
  15. ^ Silicon Valley. "Silicon Valley Online". http://www.siliconvalleyonline.org/cities.html#santacruz. Retrieved 2007-11-11. 

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Coordinates: 37°22′N 122°02′W / 37.37°N 122.04°W / 37.37; -122.04


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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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