Robert Noyce Research Articles

First-Year Urban Mathematics and Science Middle School Teachers

This study explored the challenges facing 1st-year alternatively certified teachers of mathematics and science in urban middle schools. Four teachers, participants in a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Robert Noyce Scholarship Program, were followed from preservice training through their 1st year of teaching, having taken part in innovative coursework, workshops, and internship training. Through focus groups, interviews, and classroom observations, data were collected to analyze their experiences in economically disadvantaged settings. The researchers explored key aspects of the scholars’ experiences, including their struggles with student performance and motivation, ways in which they developed strategies to strengthen their self-efficacy and resilience, and how novel strategies for assessing learning improved their teaching. By examining their perceptions of classroom situations and cultural contexts, and their emerging coping mechanisms, others can learn about how novice teachers may be better prepared to work in challenging environments, and develop recommendations for enabling teacher-training programs to meet the needs of their students.

Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor (review)

Reviewed by: Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor Michael Riordan (bio) Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor. By Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. xii+312. $24.95. During the past few decades, scholars have been steadily building an edifice of works on the history of the semiconductor technology—the material culture of what is widely identified as the information age. An early effort was Ernst Braun and Stuart MacDonald’s 1978 brief survey Revolution in Miniature, on the history and impact of semiconductor electronics. In 1992 Braun, Lillian Hoddeson, and others published Out of the Crystal Maze, a volume of scholarly essays about the origins of solid-state physics, the scientific roots that flowered during the second quarter of the twentieth century. More recent works have focused on specific devices or technologies—for example, Crystal Fire, a 1997 book I coauthored with Hoddeson on the transistor’s invention and development, and Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age, on the rise of metal-oxide semiconductor technology. And biographies have been written about transistor inventors John Bardeen and William Shockley, as well as microchip pioneer Robert Noyce. Historians are now bearing down on the integrated circuit, the second major advance in semiconductor technology after the transistor. This pivotal breakthrough occurred largely at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, but crucial contributions came from a host of other institutions, including Bell Labs, Sperry Gyroscope, and the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories. The history of the integrated circuit is correspondingly harder to write. The task is made yet more difficult because the documentary resources are uneven, scattered, and in the case of Fairchild hard to access. [End Page 660] Christophe Lécuyer and David Brock’s Makers of the Microchip is therefore a welcome addition to this literature, filling an important gap in our understanding. Its focus is narrow—on the development of “planar” silicon processing at Fairchild from 1957 to 1961. But deservedly so, for planar technology still forms the foundation of semiconductor manufacturing five decades later, when the number of transistors on a microchip has swollen to over a billion. More than any other factor, this steady, unrelenting growth—as characterized by Moore’s law—has converted digital computers into common portable, personal devices. Without this revolutionary material technology, computers would still exist, encompassing cubic meters of discrete transistors, but only large companies or institutions could afford to own and operate them. Lécuyer and Brock have been working closely with Jay Last, leader of the Fairchild team that extended the planar approach pioneered by his colleague Jean Hoerni to the manufacture of silicon integrated circuits from 1959 to 1961. Luckily, Last understood the historical significance of what he and his coworkers were up to, keeping originals or copies of important documents, including lab notebook pages. Otherwise, they would likely have been lost to history. As Fairchild Semiconductor was purchased by another company, then sold and resold, few documents related to its technological origins have been preserved. The best collection rests in Stanford University’s archives, but it is piecemeal compared to what historians can access on, for example, Bell Labs. The crucial lab notebooks—of Hoerni, Last, Moore, Noyce, and others—are still closely held by National Semiconductor Corp., which is soon to be purchased by Texas Instruments. Fittingly, Last adds a foreword to this book; it is his opus almost as much as Lécuyer and Brock’s. In their narrative summary and commentaries on his selected documents, copies of which are included, the authors provide the analysis and perspective of seasoned historians—offering further insights from their dozens of interviews with Fairchild founders and employees. These additions help to contextualize the documents for readers less familiar with the semiconductor industry and promote a better understanding of the process they used to write history. Readers get to view raw historical data and grasp how they have been infused with additional meanings. In 1998 Last published an essay titled “Two Communications Revolutions,” comparing the impact of semiconductor technology with that due to movable type five centuries before. It is an apt parallel, made even more...

Looking back on Censtor and PMRC

Prehistory of Censtor Corporation was described. A ten-year study of Nature’s neurological ways and means of processing information led the author to the research of computer-based technology, in particular, perpendicular magnetic storage technology. With funding Censtor Corporation was founded with Dr. Robert Noyce as Chairman of the board. Censtor Corporation created novel technology on perpendicular magnetic recording with the unique head in contact with the medium.

Optimizing teacher preparation loan forgiveness programs: Variables related to perceived influence

AbstractThis research used multilevel modeling to investigate the perceived effect of a teacher preparation loan forgiveness program on recruiting science and mathematics majors to become teachers and teach in high‐need schools. The study investigated how and which personal perceptions, characteristics, and teacher preparation program variables influenced recipient perceptions. Data used for the study were collected from participants in the National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, which provides funding for highly qualified science and mathematics majors to teach in high‐need schools. Recipients agree to teach in high‐need schools for at least 2 years in return for each year of funding. The results suggest that scholars' race, their path into teaching, their perceptions of their preparation for teaching in high‐need schools, and the amount of funding were significant variables. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 95: 121–144, 2011

Resuscitating industrial research without monopoly money

The award of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George E. Smith underscores again the importance of industrial research, the subject of Joe Anderson and Orv Butler’s article, “Industrial R&D in Transition” (Physics Today, July 2009, page 36). I have a few comments to add about companies involved in semiconductor research, with which I am most familiar.At Bell Labs from the postwar period through the mid-1960s, an “enlightened management philosophy” espoused by President Mervin Kelly attracted some of the best scientists and engineers, allowing them substantial latitude to follow their instincts in pursuit of basic research. But their research had to be on topics that might help its parent company AT&T improve its communications products and services. That mission-oriented approach helped Bell Labs attract such first-rate physicists as William Shockley, John Bardeen, Charles Townes, and Philip Anderson, who would otherwise have gone right into academia (which they all did eventually). Kelly realized that scientists of such high caliber could not be told exactly what research avenues to pursue but instead needed the freedom to find their own paths. By setting an overarching mission of improving communications, however, Kelly got what he had bargained for.Thus when Bardeen came on board in early 1946, Shockley asked him to examine why the group’s attempts to make a field-effect semiconductor amplifier had failed so miserably. Bardeen soon suggested his hypothesis of “surface states”—that electrons trapped on the semiconductor surface were blocking electric fields from penetrating it. He and Walter Brattain were then encouraged to pursue basic research on the nature of those states. More than a year later, in November 1947, they made a serendipitous discovery that enabled them to invent the point-contact transistor. The mission-oriented focus of industrial research at Bell Labs meant that the fruits of basic research could be applied almost immediately to fabricating a useful electronic device. Today, more than 60 years later, the transistor is among the most useful devices ever created.Bell Labs could afford to grant its best scientists that freedom because AT&T enjoyed a regulated monopoly on US telephone service. A few pennies of every dollar that we paid for toll calls in those days went to support the R&D efforts of Bell Labs and Western Electric. Given such a stable, assured funding stream, managers like Kelly could take a long-range view and support risky research projects that might not contribute to the company’s bottom line for decades, if ever. Other industrial labs that did basic research—for example, General Electric and IBM—also enjoyed lucrative monopolies or near-monopolies on important goods and services. They, too, could and did take the long view.After its 1984 breakup, however, AT&T had to compete head-to-head with its regional offspring and other companies such as MCI. Bell Labs no longer enjoyed the stable funding guaranteed by government regulation. Although its managers strove to maintain a commitment to basic research, the financial odds were stacked against them. Research that might not contribute to the bottom line within several years became increasingly difficult to justify.Similar influences contributed to the decline of the central research labs that Anderson and Butler discuss, many of which had been established during the 1950s and 1960s in emulation of Bell Labs. Another problem was getting the fruits of research out of the labs and into product development in their manufacturing arms. Here Kelly tried another management innovation, setting up satellite units of Bell Labs engineers in certain Western Electric plants—for example, the plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that fabricated high-tech semiconductor devices. Similar difficulties occurred at Fairchild Semiconductor Corp, which marketed the first commercial silicon microchips in 1961. Thus when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore quit Fairchild and founded Intel seven years later, they intentionally avoided setting up a separate research lab; instead they incorporated R&D (predominantly D) functions directly in Intel’s production units.The 1950s and 1960s truly marked the industrial research labs’ golden age, driven in part by the Cold War and ample military funding, and Bell Labs was its great exemplar. Doing basic research in a practical, industrial context and focusing it on improving goods and services has clearly had an enormous impact on modern life. We need to find ways to resuscitate that kind of activity in our laboratories today.© 2010 American Institute of Physics.

Robert Noyce, Silicon Valley, and the Teamwork Behind the High-Technology Revolution

What makes for success in the fast-paced world of high-technology business? History offers important guidance. A look at the career of one of the most charismatic and important inventors and entrepreneurs of the twentieth century—Robert Noyce— makes it clear that in order to succeed as an inventor or as a business leader, it is essential to collaborate with others and to understand that an important part of any invention is the business of selling it. In 1959, Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit, a device that lies at the heart of modern electronics. Noyce also cofounded two extremely successful companies: Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon firm in Silicon Valley, and Intel, today the largest semiconductor company in the world (1). Right up until his death in 1990 at the age of sixty-two, Noyce was a daredevil. His jacket bore a patch that read, “No guts, no glory.” It...

Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure, Reprint of U.S. Patent 2,981,877 (Issued April 25, 1961. Filed July 30, 1959)

Robert Noyce, who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 with seven others including Jean Hoerni and Gordon E. Moore, and went on to found Intel with Moore in 1968, received Patent No. 2,981,877 in 1961 for the first monolithic integrated circuit made of silicon. He and J.S. Kilby are recognized as co-inventors of the integrated circuit. Noyce received the President's National Merit of Science Award in 1979 for his work, as did J.S. Kilby in 1969. Read all seven pages of the original patent filing.

Crystal Fire: The Invention, Development and Impact of the Transistor, Adapted from Chapter 1 of Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age, by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & Company.

[Adapted from Chapter 1 of "Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age," by M. Riordan and L. Hoddeson, 1997, W.W. Norton & Co.] This book by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson recounts the lives of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, the three principal inventors of the transistor, and the revolutionary discoveries of others including Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni and J.S. Kilby that led to the computer era and the phenomenon of Silicon Valley.

Miniaturized Electronic Circuits (U. S. Patent No. 3,138, 743)

A reprint of US Patent 3,138,743 (Issued June 23, 1964. Filed Feb. 6, 1959), issued to J.S. Kilby, is presented. Kilby's integrated circuit provided the breakthrough for microelectronics as we know it. In his patent he claimed his invention resulted from a new and totally different concept for miniaturization. Radically departing from the teachings of the art, it is proposed by the invention that miniaturization can best be obtained by use of as few materials and operations as possible. In accordance with the principles of the invention, the ultimate in circuit miniaturization is attained using only one material for all circuit elements. Kilby received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics as the inventor of the integrated circuit (IC) after the death of Robert Noyce in 1990. All eight pages of the original patent, plus four pages of illustrations are included.

The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (review)

The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (review)

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley [Book Review

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley [Book Review

Robert Noyce and the tunnel diode

This paper claims that Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp., was the inventor of the tunnel diode even as Leo Esaki received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement. When Esaki, then a 49-year old semiconductor research scientist at IBM Corp., won his Nobel Prize, neither he nor the Nobel committee had any idea about Noyce's work. Esaki had made a tunnel diode and measured its current versus voltage behavior 16 years earlier. The Nobel committee, in fact, dated Esaki's discovery from 1957, roughly contemporaneous with Noyce's recollected work in the same field. Noyce offers a notebook from 1956 which contains a complete description of the tunnel diode as proof.

Entrepreneurship and the Rise of Silicon Valley: The Career of Robert Noyce, 1956–1990

My premise in this dissertation is that the career of Robert Noyce can illuminate the relationship between technical entrepreneurship and the rise of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, California. Noyce invented the first practical integrated circuit, the precursor to the microprocessors that lie at the heart of modern electronics. He cofounded Silicon Valley's first successful semiconductor company, Fairchild Semiconductor, in 1957, as well as the industry's most power ful firm, Intel. Noyce both cofounded and served as a prominent spokesman for the industry's most effective lobbying organization, the Semiconductor Industry Association. His successful entrepreneurial career inspired hundreds of Silicon Valley residents to start their own high-tech companies. For the last two years of his life, Noyce served as the first Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SEMATECH, a billion dollar manufacturing research consortium with membership that included fourteen semiconductor firms and the Department of Defense. I draw on twenty-five oral history interviews with Noyce's contemporaries and on four years of research in a half-dozen corporate and university archives.1 I explore four major themes: the

Entrepreneurship and the Rise of Silicon Valley: The Career of Robert Noyce, 1956–1990

Entrepreneurship and the Rise of Silicon Valley: The Career of Robert Noyce, 1956–1990

Microchip: an idea, its genesis, and the revolution it created

From the Publisher: The riveting story of the origins of our digital age and the crusaders and inventors who made it all possible. Computer chips are an almost invisible part of our lives, and yet they make much of what's modern in them possible. Even the tech-averse and the tech-opposed among us depend on their hidden capabilities. From today's automobiles, medical scanners, and DVD players to annoying musical greeting cards, space travel, and movies like The Lord of the Rings, microelectronics are everywhere-and taken for granted. But how did this revolutionary technology emerge? Microchip tells that story by exploring the personalities behind the technology. From the two pioneering men who invented the integrated circuit, Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby and Intel founder Robert Noyce, to luminaries like Gordon Moore and An Wang who put the chip to work, Jeffrey Zygmont shows how the history of the microchip is also the story of a handful of visionaries confronting problems and facing opportunities. A compelling narrative about the germination and advancement of a single technology, Microchip is essential reading about the now-ubiquitous integrated circuit and its outlook for the future. Author Biography: Author of The VC Way, Jeffrey Zygmont is a business and technology writer. He has written for BusinessWeek, Boston Magazine, Inc., and CFO, and has been a staff writer for High Technology and Omni. He lives in Salem, New Hampshire.

Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1968

Robert Noyce's career at Fairchild Semiconductor sheds light on several developments that were central to the growth of Silicon Valley and the semiconductor industry: entrepreneurship, technical leadership, and the management of growth in a high-technology company. Noyce served as Fairchild Semiconductors first head of R&D and as its general manager for the six years of the company's most dramatic growth. His technical orientation, personal interest in new technologies, and hands-off management style helped establish a culture at the firm that welcomed innovations in research, process technology, manufacturing, and marketing. As Fairchild Semiconductor grew into a multidivisional mass producer, Noyce's entrepreneurial leadership proved inadequate. Communication breakdowns between divisions, coupled with a series of poor decisions by the parent company, further contributed to the decline of Fairchild Semiconductor.

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Transforming an industry in crisis: Charisma, routinization, and supportive cultural leadership

This article narrates the saga of how leaders in the highly competitive U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry framed their future as a struggle for survival against an unprincipled adversary and thus generated an industry-wide strategy for battling the competition. Their strategy amounted to a social experiment in that it required unprecedented cooperation from members of the industry. Our account and analysis focus on four remarkable, interrelated aspects of this saga: (1) how these leaders linked their actions to support the charisma of their central leader—Robert Noyce—who became the first CEO of the resultant consortium; (2) how the participation they shared in the saga of the founding and growth of the U.S. semiconductor industry, especially at Fairchild Industries, provided a basis for their later cooperation; (3) how they created an unusual participative and democratic culture at Sematech; and (4) how Noyce's vision persisted after his death through various forms of routinization established earlier. Five bodies of qualitative data generated in two independent series of investigations inform this study. They include two sets of in-depth interviews with participants at various levels, extensive archival data, ethographic observations, informal conversations and interviews, and information supplied by a key informant.

The history of the microcomputer-invention and evolution

Intel's founder, Robert Noyce, chartered Ted Hoff's Applications Research Department in 1969 to find new applications for silicon technology-the microcomputer was the result. Hoff thought it would be neat to use MOS LSI technology to produce a computer. Because of the ever growing density of large scale integrated (LSI) circuits a "computer on a chip" was inevitable. But in 1970 we could only get about 2000 transistors on a chip, and a conventional CPU would need about 10 times that number. We developed two "microcomputers" 10 years ahead of "schedule," by scaling down the requirements and using a few other "tricks" described in this paper.

Portraits in Silicon by Robert Slater

198 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tween the Continental and Anglo-American traditions would help advance the overall level of discussion. The analyses in this section tend to move back somewhat to an understanding of technology in general, rather than dealing more strictly with computers. On the whole, while the volume cannot be considered strictly an introductory reader, since it requires some background understand­ ing of wider philosophical issues, it is surprisingly accessible and does give coverage to the central concerns in the held. It would be useful to anyone wanting to obtain a deeper understanding of the debates surrounding the issues in information technology. Heinz C. Luegenbiehl Dr. Luegenbiehl is professor of philosophy and technology studies at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Portraits in Silicon. By Robert Slater. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. xiv+ 374; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). In Portraits in Silicon, Robert Slater presents biographical sketches of thirty-four people who have played important roles in the history of computing. Conceptualizers and theoreticians are represented: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shan­ non, and Donald Knuth. There are early computer builders: Konrad Zuse, John Atanasoff, John Mauchly, Presper Eckert, Howard Aiken, and Jay Forrester. There are some of the inventors who made possible the miniaturization of computers: William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, and Ted Hoff. There are hardware designers—Gene Amdahl, Seymour Cray, Gordon Bell—and software designers— Grace Hopper, John Backus, John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz, Gary Kildall, William Gates, Dennis Ritchie, Kenneth Thompson, Daniel Bricklin. And there are entrepreneurs: Thomas Watson, William Norris, Ross Perot, Nolan Bushnell, Steven Jobs, Adam Osborne, and William Millard. Though the work of neither a historian nor an insider, Portraits in Silicon contains, in a highly readable form, a great deal of informa­ tion, much of it derived from interviews that Slater conducted with twenty-three of the subjects. The writing tends to the anecdotal, with only occasional explanations of hardware or software and only occasional mention of philosophical, political, and social issues raised by the existence of computers. Where the book is most useful is in describing the backgrounds and motivations of the subjects. The polybiographical approach may suggest some patterns. It struck me that many of the subjects had fathers who were engineers; that many, if not most, built mechanical or electrical gadgets as children; and that TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 199 many were drawn to computing machinery by the practical need to carry out computations. The early history of the electronic computer has, quite naturally, received more scholarly attention than have the developments of the last two or three decades; books by Paul Ceruzzi, Herman Goldstine, and Michael Williams are among the best accounts of the early history. The rapid pace of developments in computing—even events of this decade, such as the introduction of the Osborne in 1981, may seem distant—makes treatment of the recent history, as in Slater’s book, particularly welcome. Frederik Nebeker Dr. Nebeker is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the American Philosophical Society, where he is writing a history of geophysics. His Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the effect of computers on meteorology. Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer. By Clark R. Mollenhoff. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988. Pp. xv + 274; illustrations, bibliography, appendixes, index. $24.95. The First Electronic Computer: The AtanasoffStory. By Alice R. Burks and Arthur W. Burks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 387; illustrations, bibliography, appendix, index. $30.00. In the late 1930s, John V. Atanasoff, a new professor of mathemat­ ics and physics at Iowa State College, abandoned his efforts to build analog devices for doing complex calculations. He began working on what he described as a “computing machine proper”—what we now call a digital computer. Atanasoffbased the machine on electricity and electronics, devised a “regenerative” memory using condensers, and used a binary system to compute by direct logical action rather than an analog approach. With the help of Clifford E. Berry, his graduate assistant, Atanasoff built a prototype to solve differential equations. In 1941, John W. Mauchly, a visiting physics professor from a Pennsylvania college, examined the computer and...