|
company
profile |
|
Fruits, vegetables, semiconductors, satellites, and state-of-the-art optical communication equipment have seemingly nothing in common. They are all, however, products of the Santa Clara Valley in California. This valley is located about 30 miles South of San Francisco, but these products are from two different eras. It is also important to remember that the center of the Silicon Valley is not San Francisco, but San Jose, which is about 40 miles South and has far more population than San Francisco. At the beginning of the 20th century the valley was renowned for its fertile soil, its orchards, fresh fruits and vegetable __ the region was then called the "Valley of Heart's Delight". In this latter era, the success of the valley is not so much because of its fertile soil, rather it is because of a growing number of innovative and technologically sophisticated entrepreneurs who have either had their homes here or have come to this valley. The products that these talented entrepreneurs have developed and are developing are based, in the majority of cases, on semiconductors. A semiconductor is a material that can exhibit properties of a conductor or an insulator depending on certain physical conditions imposed on it. It turns out that silicon has become the most popular semiconductor. It is the name of this semiconductor that has inspired the name for this affluent and prosperous region. The name Silicon Valley was used, for the first time, in 1971 and has stayed on since then. Since this is the first issue of our magazine, Silicon Iran, it is appropriate at this point to mention that while the semiconductor silicon is an element in Group IV of the periodic table, "silicone" is that rubbery compound that is used for caulking around bathtubs and, in some forms, is also used for breast implants 行 it is not a semiconductor and has nothing to do with silicon. Indeed the evolution of Silicon Valley started well before its christening. Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, about forty miles south of the city of San Francisco, has always played a role in the development of Silicon Valley. In fact the story goes back to the 1930s and to Fred Terman who was an electrical engineering professor at Stanford. Many people think of Professor Terman as the father of Silicon Valley. He was concerned with the fact that owing to the lack of proper employment opportunities in the area, his engineering graduates had to leave for the East Coast for decent jobs. He always encouraged his students to seek employment locally or start their own companies.
In 1938 two of Professor Terman's students, William Hewlett and David Packard, started their own company in the family garage near Stanford. It is important to stress that the transistor, which is the first building block of almost all electronic circuits and, in the majority of cases, is made of silicon, had not yet been invented. Hewlett and Packard set out to develop audio oscillators based on the thermo-ionic valves also called vacuum tubes. Oscillators are devices that produce signals of varying frequency and amplitude. The vacuum tube had been previously invented by Sir John Ambrose Fleming of University College London, England, in 1904. Those of us who remember old radio receivers with big knobs in front in our parents or grandparents homes, have had a glimpse of the vacuum tube technology. Hewlett-Packard was incorporated in 1939, and their first large order was from Walt Disney Production for four oscillators to be used in the making of the motion picture "Fantasia". For decades to follow Hewlett-Packard became one of the world's largest producers of test, measurement, and computer equipment. Records show that in 1999 HP employed over 85,000 people worldwide in 120 countries with net revenue of over $40 billion. In 1937 the Varian brothers, with the help of a physics professor, William Hansen, set out to develop the klystron tube -- a system for generating high frequency, high power signals. Terman referred one of his Ph.D. students to work with Hansen on the klystron project. The primary application of this system, in those days, was in radar and so the team spent the war years on the East Coast developing the klystron tube. Subsequently Ginzton and Hansen returned to Stanford where they became faculty members and in 1948, together with Varian brothers, they founded Varian Associates. In subsequent decades this company contributed to semiconductor equipment and medical diagnostic products and was a key factor in the formation of Silicon Valley. In the early 1950s Stanford University was in dire financial straits. Terman had a creative idea - to lease Stanford farmlands to high tech industries so that they could set up their companies there. Through this process the Stanford Industrial Park was created. The goal was to have a high tech industrial center near the university so that Stanford graduates, after graduation, could seek employment and, at the same time, generate revenue for the university. In 1953 Varian Associates moved into this park, and was soon followed by Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard, and others. It is ironic that the invention of the transistor, so essential to every modern-day circuitry, did not take place in Silicon Valley. A transistor is 3-pin device that can amplify signals (e.g. voice signal from a microphone) or can be used as an electronic switch. It is this latter application of transistors that has led to a revolution in digital technology. After World War II, AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey charged one of its top-notch scientists, William Shockley, with developing a solid-state amplifier. As the name suggests, a solid-state device is one in which electronic activity takes place within a solid material (e.g. a semiconductor) without a need for vacuum, gas, high voltages, or any glass tubes. Neither the audio oscillator developed by HP, nor the klystron tube developed by Varian, were solid-state devices. Shockley is known to be the visionary in the development of the transistor. However, that project would probably not have succeeded, if not for the other two team-members, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Bardeen was the thinker and an exceptional theorist, while Brattain was the experimenter and the builder. The unique skills that these three men brought together created an environment within which their ideas could germinate. We should state, however, that as is the case with most scientific accomplishments, many other scientists had made contributions to the state of knowledge at that time, for these three men to be successful. Bell Laboratories unveiled this grand invention on June 30, 1948. By today's standards, primitive as it may look, this invention revolutionized the electronic industry. Despite the success of the transistor, the three men had clashing personalities and the issue of who should get credit for the invention turned into a mess. Shockley believed that since he was asked to lead the project, all the credit should be given to him and no credit were due to the other two men. Bardeen and Brattain found the situation intolerable and the three men could not work together. They grew apart and subsequently never had anything to do with each other. The three men did, however, meet in 1956 in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in physics for their joint invention. Brilliant as he was, as the literature suggests, Shockley was definitely not a people's person and he was a rather poor manager. People under him were getting promoted at Bell Labs. Nothing would satisfy him unless he was a hundred percent in charge. After a few short- term employments outside of Bell Labs, he decided to go solo. In August 1959, Shockley spent a short while with his new friend Arnold Beckman, a chemist and businessman, in Los Angeles. Shockley shared his idea of starting his own company to produce semiconductor devices with Beckman, who was sold on the idea and financially supported the venture. Shockley was then lured by Fred Terman to start his company in Palo Alto. Finally, the Shockley Transistor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments was founded in the Stanford Industrial Park. This was the first entrepreneurial effort in the valley in so far as semiconductor technology is concerned and as we see shortly, this event led to a chain reaction, which rippled through this area and created the Silicon Valley. Shockley's company, however, never made a single dollar and neither he nor his co-inventors were never financially rewarded for their invention.
Shockley was an outstanding physicist and through his fame and reputation, he was able to hire some of the best people for his company. Indeed the people he assembled were probably the best team of people ever put together in the electronics industry. However Shockley's personality, his oppressive management style, the fact that he did not trust anyone, once again worked against him to the point that eight of his best people 行 the so called the "traitorous eight" -- left Shockley's company in 1957. These men were: Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. The father of one of these men had contacts in a New York investment firm, and through this contact they sought financing for their new venture. This firm sent a young finance executive named Arthur Rock to secure financing for them. Rock approached many companies, but none was ready to back this new enterprise. The idea of investing in high-risk new technology was rarely known then. It was Arthur Rock who coined the term "venture capital" in 1965 and became Silicon Valley's first venture capitalist. Eventually due to Rock's efforts the eight men were able to obtain financing from an industrialist named Sherman Fairchild and so Fairchild Semiconductors was born in 1957. The company set out to produce transistors in an efficient and marketable fashion. Led by Robert Noyce, Fairchild introduced what has since become a distinctive Californian style 行 casual attire and laid back management style. In 1958, IBM placed an order for the first transistors -- 100 transistors at $150 apiece. This order contributed to the early success of Fairchild Semiconductors. Transistors became commonly used electronic devices and engineers would make circuits consisting of several transistors together with other components such as diodes, resistors and capacitors. You could see circuits like this in, for example, every transistor radio. At that time it was not possible to build other circuit components such as resistors and capacitors out of silicon. If this could be done, then one could build the entire circuit from silicon, rather than just the transistor. Two individuals independently pursued this effort. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments developed such a circuit and filed for a patent on it. Texas Instruments called their invention a "Solid Circuit". This kind of device later came to be known as an integrated circuit (IC). Here in California at Fairchild, Robert Noyce also had the same ideas and developed an integrated circuit which was called the "planar" IC. It is believed that while Kilby had formulated a practical method of combining individual components in an integrated form, Noyce had developed a better way of connecting these components to each other. Knowing that TI had already applied for a patent, Fairchild wrote a detailed patent application so that they would not infringe on TI's application. The Fairchild building where Noyce developed his integrated circuit is located on Charleston Road, in Palo Alto, California, a few miles south of Stanford University. This location is currently recognized as a historical site in California.
On April 25, 1961 the Patent Office awarded the first patent on an integrated circuit to Robert Noyce, while Kilby's application was still under consideration. Today credit is given to both men for having independently invented the integrated circuit. Since these inventions, the scientists have strived for means for making ever-smaller and faster circuits 行 that is to develop the capability to put more and more minute circuitry onto as small a piece of silicon as possible. This way more functionality can be derived from a single chip. This art has come to be known as integrated circuit, planar, solid state, or microelectronic technology. These terms all basically mean the same thing. Today, chips are mass-produced on silicon wafers 200 to 300 mm in diameter. Normally we refer to a chip when the device has gone through the entire manufacturing process and is packaged. At the wafer level we refer to each individual device as a "die". The dies are "printed" on the wafers through a process called photolithography and then the circuits are etched. A single wafer can result in many dies, depending on the size of the die. The smallest feature that the process prints is referred to design rule. At the present time devices with 0.18-micron design rule are commercially available, and devices with 0.13-micron design rule are moving to pilot production. As always, researches are working on devices with smaller design rules with 0.1-micron devices being the next technology node. Fairchild's role in the development of Silicon Valley goes beyond the commercialization of the transistor and the integrated circuit. Many key people left Fairchild to start their own companies, and that is the key to the development of Silicon Valley. This is the case not only in terms of technology development but also in creative financing and venture capital, which has been the backbone for most startups in the valley. Today Sand Hill Road, located in Menlo Park, very near Stanford University, is the venture capital center of the world. In 1961 Jean Hoerni, one of the original eight men of Fairchild, became Vice President of the newly formed semiconductor division of Teledyne. In 1967 Charlie Sporck, a Fairchild employee, not one of the original eight, left to become the Chief Executive Officer of National Semiconductor, a company which was then based in Danbury, Connecticut. That same year Sporck brought the headquarters of National to Santa Clara 行 another major event in the building of Silicon Valley. In 1968 Victor Grinich left Fairchild and founded Escort Memory Systems. Also in 1968 Jerrry Sanders, who was the Director of World-Wide Marketing at Fairchild, left to start Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) together with co-founder John Carey. Eugene Kleiner, another one of the eight, together with Thomas Perkins formed America's premier venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, in 1972. The intent was to provide resources and capital investment for entrepreneurs. The Kleiner Perkins partnership and the subsequent Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers series of partnerships have created some of the most creative and rapidly growing businesses of the 20th century, with assets measured in tens of billions of dollars. One of the most notable events in the history of Silicon Valley is probably the founding of Intel. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had both done very well at Fairchild. Moore was the head of R&D and Noyce was the business manager. The two men left Fairchild in July 1968, putting up $250,000 apiece and getting $2.5 million in investment, and started Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Andy Grove is also known as one of Intel's founders, although he was not one of the original investors. Intel did not enter into competition with Fairchild; instead, they began developing memory chips, and by 1971 they had a successful line of business selling these devices. In 1971 a young scientist called Ted Hoff invented the first microprocessor 行 the so-called 4004. Microprocessors are like the brain for a computer. This device was 3.2mm by 1.6 mm with 2300 transistors. Although today's powerful microprocessors have millions of transistors, the 4004 was as powerful as the first computer built in 1946 with vacuum tubes. In 1984, owing to declining operational excellence and fierce competition from the Japanese companies, Intel went through a strategic inflection point, as described by Andy Grove in his book "Only the Paranoid Survive". That year has indeed been a historical turning point in Intel's history. Professor Robert Burgelman of Stanford Graduate School of Business uses this inflection point in his courses on Corporate Strategy and refers to this decision on the part of Intel's management in his book "Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation". Since then Intel has become the largest chip maker in the world and the focus of the company has primarily been microprocessors. In 1970 after Intel established itself as the first successful microprocessor company, many other companies followed its footsteps.
In the earlier days of chip making, the companies developed their own equipment. Applied Materials was founded in Santa Clara in 1967 to supply materials and components needed for chip making. However the "homemade" chip making equipment developed by the chip makers was diverse and non-standard, making the process very unreliable. In 1977 Applied Materials put its focus on designing, developing and marketing chip-making equipment. Today Applied Materials is the world leader in major segments of this industry. Amongst other major chip making equipment companies located in Silicon Valley, one can name Novellus and Lam Research. It is important to stress that these companies do not make the chips themselves, rather they make process equipment that the chip makers use. This way the chip-makers can stay focused on designing and manufacturing chips, rather than worrying about developing tools for their work. If a carpenter has to worry about making his own saw then he gets to do little carpentry! Also in the early days, the yield was very low. This means that when batch processing wafers, the number of working devices at the end of the line was small compared to the number of dies on the wafers. In 1976 KLA Instruments 行 a company devoted to providing yield management solutions 行 was founded. These solutions revolve around photo-mask (a mask through which the circuit is projected on to the wafer in lithography) and wafer inspection systems. Tencor Instruments was also founded in 1976. The first product of this company was a stylus-based system for profiling and line width measurement. In 1984 Tencor Instruments introduced its first laser-based tool for contamination monitoring on wafer surfaces. Both KLA and Tencor have provided a tremendous value to the chip-makers in so far as yield improvement is concerned. In May 1997 these two companies, each with over twenty years of experience in wafer inspection and metrology, merged to form KLA-Tencor Corporation, based in San Jose, California. In 1980s and 1990 companies such as Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics flourished in Silicon Valley. The telecommunication resurgence and the Internet have led to the creation of Cisco Systems and 3Com. Also, more recently ever-increasing demand for bandwidth in Internet applications has resulted in many fiber and integrated optics companies. Today there are over 3000 high tech companies established in Silicon Valley, many of which are still in the start up phase. |
By
Figure
1. The image of the first transistor developed at AT&T Bell
Laboratories and unvieled in 1948.
Figure
2. The bronze historical marker in front of the building where
Robert Noyce developed the first integrated circuit at Fairchild.
Figure
3. Image of the first integrated circuit developed at Fairchild
Semiconductor by Robert Noyce.
Figure
4. Picture of the Pintium IV processor die. This device is based
on 0.18 micorn design rule process technology and has 12 million
transistors.