The origin of Silicon Valley back to the formation of Hewlett-Packard Company in 1938, and Varian Associates in 1948, within the incubator of Stanford University. While the semiconductor industry arose in the 1950s, Silicon Valley’s success is rooted in the establishment of Stanford University in 1891.
During the Korean War of the early 1950s, the university began to receive significant funding from the Department of Defense for its work on traveling-wave tube (TWT) amplifiers and high-power klystron studies.
In 1955, William Shockley, who had coinvented the transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947, founded Shockley Transistor Corporation in Palo Alto. The spin-off of Fairchild Semiconductor from Shockley Transistor and the “Fairchildren” that followed are widely believed to be the stimuli that set the Silicon Valley juggernaut in motion.
During the 1960s, Silicon Valley came into its own. The cold war and the space race created an increased demand for integrated circuits. The Apollo program saw NASA sourcing an estimated 60% of all its integrated circuits from the Santa Clara Valley area. In 1964 alone, NASA purchased 100,000 integrated circuits from Fairchild Semiconductor.
It was the journalist Don Hoefler who popularized the name Silicon Valley. He wrote a series of articles called “Silicon Valley USA,'' written for Electronic News; the series ran for 3 weeks, beginning 11 January 1971.
The term Silicon Valley refers to a region in the south San Francisco Bay Area. The name was first adopted in the early 1970s because of the region's association with the silicon transistor, which is used in all modern microprocessors. Many of the headquarters of global leading high-tech companies and thousands of techs and other startups are located in the Silicon Valley.
History of Silicon Valley, United States
