Google doodle honors 'Mayor of Silicon Valley' Robert Noyce
Robert Noyce was a scientist early to the new field of semiconductors, as well as an entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.
Robert Noyce, a man as responsible as anyone for the name and culture of Silicon Valley, was honored today with a Google doodle to commemorate what would have been his 84th birthday.
Visitors to Google.com are greeted with an image of an integrated circuit with Google etched onto its center. Noyce is credited as one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, which combines multiple compute functions on a semiconductor.
Noyce was a co-founder of the Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel, which he co-founded with Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove in 1968.
He was considered a visionary and cultivated the more relaxed corporate environment Silicon Valley is known for.
At a technical level, one of his largest contributions was advances in chip design that allowed them to be mass produced on silicon.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 62 in 1990 when he was CEO of Sematech, a consortium between the federal government and 14 companies to improve U.S. competitiveness in semiconductors.