Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), known as "the Mayor of Silicon Valley," was an American physicist and entrepreneur. He helped start Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He also helped create the first monolithic integrated circuit, or microchip, made with silicon. This invention supported the development of personal computers and inspired the name "Silicon Valley."

Noyce founded The Noyce School of Applied Computing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, within the College of Engineering. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave him the National Medal of Technology. In 1989, he was honored in the U.S. Business Hall of Fame, with President George H. W. Bush speaking at the event. In 1990, he received a Lifetime Achievement Medal alongside Jack Kilby and John Bardeen during the 200th anniversary celebration of the Patent Act.

Early life

Robert Noyce was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He was the third of four brothers, and his father was Reverend Ralph Brewster Noyce. Reverend Noyce graduated from Doane College, Oberlin College, and the Chicago Theological Seminary. He was also nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship.

Noyce’s mother, Harriet May Norton, was the daughter of Reverend Milton J. Norton, a Congregational clergyman, and Louise Hill. She graduated from Oberlin College. Before getting married, she wanted to become a missionary. Journalist Tom Wolfe described her as "a smart and determined woman."

Noyce had three brothers: Donald Sterling Noyce, Gaylord Brewster Noyce, and Ralph Harold Noyce. Donald became a respected professor and a leader in undergraduate education at the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry. A prize named after him, the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize, was created to honor excellence in teaching at Berkeley. Gaylord became a respected professor of practical theology and a dean of students at Yale Divinity School. In 1961, while still a young professor, he was arrested for participating in the Freedom Riders, a group that worked for civil rights.

Noyce’s earliest childhood memory was beating his father at ping pong. He was surprised when his mother responded to his victory with a distracted comment: "Wasn’t that nice of Daddy to let you win?" At five years old, Noyce was upset by the idea of intentionally losing. He told his mother, "That’s not the game. If you’re going to play, play to win!"

At twelve years old, in the summer of 1940, Noyce and his brother built a small aircraft they used to fly from the roof of the Grinnell College stables. Later, he built a radio from scratch and attached a motor and propeller from an old washing machine to the back of his sled to make it move. His parents were both religious, but Noyce became an agnostic and did not follow a religion in later life.

Education

Noyce was born in Grinnell, Iowa. During high school, he showed talent in mathematics and science. He took a college-level physics course at Grinnell College during his senior year. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and began attending Grinnell College that same year. He was the star diver for the 1947 Midwest Conference Championship swim team. While at Grinnell College, Noyce participated in singing, played the oboe, and acted in plays. In his junior year, he got in trouble for stealing a 25-pound pig from the mayor's farm and cooking it at a school luau. The mayor wrote to Noyce's parents, explaining that stealing an animal in Iowa is a serious crime with a minimum punishment of one year in prison and a $1 fine. Noyce faced being expelled from school, but Grant Gale, his physics professor and the college president, believed Noyce had valuable potential. They reached an agreement with the mayor so that Grinnell College would pay for the pig, and Noyce was suspended for one semester. He returned to school in February 1949. He graduated with honors in physics and mathematics in 1949 and earned the Phi Beta Kappa award. His classmates also gave him the Brown Derby Prize, which honored the student who achieved the best grades with the least effort.

While in college, Noyce became interested in physics. His professor, Grant Gale, showed his class two of the first transistors ever made by Bell Labs. Noyce was very interested in this new technology. Gale encouraged Noyce to apply for a physics doctoral program at MIT, which Noyce did.

Noyce was known for his quick thinking, and his graduate school friends called him "Rapid Robert." He earned his doctorate in physics from MIT in 1953.

Career

After graduating from MIT in 1953, Noyce worked as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia. He left in 1956 to join William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor and a Nobel Prize winner, at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.

Noyce left in 1958 with a group of eight others, known as the "traitorous eight," due to disagreements with Shockley’s leadership style. He helped start the influential Fairchild Semiconductor company. Sherman Fairchild said Noyce’s strong explanation of his ideas was the reason he agreed to support the group in creating the semiconductor division.

Noyce played a key role in inventing the integrated circuit. After Jack Kilby created the first hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC) in 1958, Noyce independently developed a new type of integrated circuit, the monolithic integrated circuit (monolithic IC), in 1959. His design was more practical than Kilby’s. Noyce’s chip used silicon, while Kilby’s used germanium. Noyce’s invention was the first monolithic integrated circuit chip. Unlike Kilby’s IC, which required external wires and could not be mass-produced, Noyce’s monolithic IC placed all components on a silicon chip and connected them with aluminum lines. The planar process, developed in 1959 by Jean Hoerni, was the foundation of Noyce’s design. The planar process itself was based on silicon surface passivation and thermal oxidation methods created by Mohamed Atalla in 1957.

In 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor to start Intel. Arthur Rock, who led Intel’s board and invested in the company, said Intel needed Noyce, Moore, and Andrew Grove to succeed, in that order. Noyce was the visionary leader, Moore was the technology expert, and Grove was the scientist who became a manager. Noyce served as Intel’s first CEO until 1975, when Moore took over. The relaxed culture at Intel reflected Noyce’s approach from Fairchild Semiconductor. He treated employees like family, encouraged teamwork, and rewarded collaboration. Noyce’s management style was "hands-on," avoiding luxury items like fancy cars, reserved parking, private jets, or expensive offices. Instead, he promoted a simple, open work environment where everyone contributed equally.

At Intel, Noyce oversaw the development of the microprocessor concept by Ted Hoff and the design of the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, by Federico Faggin. This was his second major contribution to technology.

Personal life

In 1953, Noyce married Elizabeth Bottomley, who graduated from Tufts University in 1951. While living in Los Altos, California, they had four children: William B., Pendred, Priscilla, and Margaret. Elizabeth loved New England, so the family bought a 50-acre coastal summer home in Bremen, Maine. Elizabeth and the children spent summers there. Robert visited during the summer while working at Intel. They divorced in 1974.

On November 27, 1974, Noyce married Ann Schmeltz Bowers. Bowers graduated from Cornell University and received an honorary Ph.D. from Santa Clara University, where she served as a trustee for nearly 20 years. She was the first director of personnel for Intel Corporation and the first vice president of human resources for Apple Inc. She helped start the Noyce Foundation, which was founded in 1990, and served as chair of its board. Bowers died on January 24, 2024, at the age of 86.

Noyce remained active throughout his life. He enjoyed reading Hemingway’s books, flying his own airplane, and participating in hang-gliding and scuba diving. Noyce believed that microelectronics would continue to become more complex and advanced. This led to questions about how society would use the technology. In his final interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he were "emperor" of the United States. He said, among other things, that he would ensure the next generation was prepared to succeed in a high-tech world. This included educating people from all backgrounds, including those with the least resources and those at the graduate school level.

Noyce suffered a heart attack at home on June 3, 1990, at the age of 62. He later died at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas.

Awards and honors

In July 1959, he applied for U.S. patent 2,981,877 "Semiconductor Device and Lead Structure," a type of integrated circuit. This work was completed only a few months after Jack Kilby made important discoveries about integrated circuits. For helping to invent the integrated circuit and its major effect on the world, three U.S. presidents honored him.

Noyce received many honors and awards. President Ronald Reagan gave him the National Medal of Technology in 1987. Two years later, he was inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame, an event organized by Junior Achievement, where President George H. W. Bush gave a speech. In 1990, Noyce—along with others like Jack Kilby and John Bardeen, the inventor of the transistor—received a "Lifetime Achievement Medal" during a celebration marking the 200th anniversary of the Patent Act.

In 1966, Noyce received the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal. In 1978, he was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor "for his contributions to the silicon integrated circuit, a cornerstone of modern electronics." In 1979, he received the National Medal of Science and the Faraday Medal. In 1980, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1989, the National Academy of Engineering gave him its Charles Stark Draper Prize.

In 1985, Noyce gave a speech to the School of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. A science building at his college, Grinnell College, is named after him.

On December 12, 2011, a Google Doodle celebrated the 84th anniversary of Noyce’s birth.

In 2000, Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics. In his speech, he mentioned a few people who helped make integrated circuits successful, including Noyce three times.

Legacy

The Noyce Foundation was created in 1990 by his family. It worked to improve math and science education for students in grades K-12. The foundation announced it would stop working in 2015.

In 2022, California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) created The Noyce School of Applied Computing in the College of Engineering. This was made possible by a $60 million gift from the Robert N. Noyce Trust in June 2022.

In 1990, Congress created the Robert Noyce National Math and Science Teachers Corps Act. This law allows up to 5,000 scholarships each year to help people earn teaching degrees. These scholarships are given to colleges and universities that submit successful proposals through the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program ("Noyce"). Students who are training to be teachers must major in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). Scholarship recipients must agree to teach science or math in schools that need more teachers for at least two years for each year they receive the scholarship. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) works with the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program to share information about ways to attract, choose, train, and keep new K-12 STEM teachers.

Patents

Noyce was granted 15 patents. The patents are listed in the order they were issued, not the order they were filed.

• U.S. patent 2,875,141: Method and apparatus for forming semiconductor structures. Filed in August 1954, issued in February 1959, and assigned to Philco Corporation.
• U.S. patent 2,929,753: Transistor structure and method. Filed in April 1957, issued in March 1960, and assigned to Beckmann Instruments.
• U.S. patent 2,959,681: Semiconductor scanning device. Filed in June 1959, issued in November 1960, and assigned to Fairchild Semiconductor.
• U.S. patent 2,968,750: Transistor structure and method of making the same. Filed in March 1957, issued in January 1961, and assigned to Clevite Corporation.
• U.S. patent 2,971,139: Semiconductor switching device. Filed in June 1959, issued in February 1961, and assigned to Fairchild Semiconductor.
• U.S. patent 2,981,877: Semiconductor Device and Lead Structure. Filed in July 1959, issued in April 1961, and assigned to Fairchild Semiconductor.
• U.S. patent 3,010,033: Field effect transistor. Filed in January 1958, issued in November 1961, and assigned to Clevite Corporation.
• U.S. patent 3,098,160: Field controlled avalanche semiconductive device. Filed in February 1958, issued in July 1963, and assigned to Clevite Corporation.
• U.S. patent 3,108,359: Method for fabricating transistors. Filed in June 1959, issued in October 1963, and assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.
• U.S. patent 3,111,590: Transistor structure controlled by an avalanche barrier. Filed in June 1958, issued in November 1963, and assigned to Clevite Corporation.
• U.S. patent 3,140,206: Method of making a transistor structure (coinventor William Shockley). Filed in April 1957, issued in July 1964, and assigned to Clevite Corporation.
• U.S. patent 3,150,299: Semiconductor circuit complex having isolation means. Filed in September 1959, issued in September 1964, and assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.
• U.S. patent 3,183,129: Method of forming a semiconductor. Filed in July 1963, issued in May 1965, and assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.
• U.S. patent 3,199,002: Solid state circuit with crossing leads. Filed in April 1961, issued in August 1965, and assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.
• U.S. patent 3,325,787: Trainable system. Filed in October 1964, issued in June 1967, and assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.

Note: In 1960, Clevite Corporation acquired Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments, where Noyce worked.