Robert Noyce

Noyce was born December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa, the third of four sons of a Congregationalist minister and a mother Tom Wolfe later described as having 'a commanding will.' He grew up in Grinnell, where a physics professor, Grant Gale, showed his class one of the first transistors out of Bell Labs and sent Noyce toward a doctorate — Grinnell College, Phi Beta Kappa in physics and math in 1949, then a PhD from MIT in 1953. Three years at Philco followed before William Shockley recruited him to Mountain View in 1956 to help build the transistor into a business. Shockley's management proved paranoid and erratic enough that within a year Noyce and seven colleagues walked out together to start over.

In 1957 he helped persuade Sherman Fairchild to bankroll a semiconductor division for the group who had just quit Shockley, and Fairchild Semiconductor was born with Noyce as its de facto technical leader. Two years later, building on a colleague's new planar process, he worked out how to put an entire circuit — transistors, wiring, and all — onto a single chip of silicon, filing a patent in July 1959 that issued in 1961. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments had reached a working integrated circuit by a different route months earlier, using external wires instead of silicon connections, and history now credits both men rather than settling the argument. In 1968 Noyce left Fairchild with Gordon Moore to found Intel, serving as its first chief executive and building an informal culture — no reserved parking, no walled offices — that Silicon Valley still imitates.

His first marriage, to Elizabeth Bottomley, produced four children and ended in 1974 after twenty-one years; he remarried within months, to Ann Bowers, who had run personnel at Intel and later became Apple's first vice president of human resources. The integrated circuit patent he and Fairchild held was contested by Texas Instruments and Jack Kilby's camp in the courts for years, a fight over credit history never fully settled either — both men are now named as co-inventors rather than one displacing the other. Noyce stepped down as Intel's chief executive in 1975, handing the company to Gordon Moore, and spent the back half of his career administering research consortia rather than running a company of his own — Sematech, the industry group fighting Japanese competition, based him in Austin, Texas, where he would die.

He died of a heart attack at home on June 3, 1990, at 62. Most of the honors had already arrived: the National Medal of Science in 1979, the National Medal of Technology from Ronald Reagan in 1987, and the U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1989, with George H. W. Bush delivering the keynote. Intel went on without him to dominate the personal computer chip market under Gordon Moore and then Andy Grove. The nickname outlasted the company too — Mayor of Silicon Valley, earned for a management style, open cubicles, no reserved parking, stock options for line workers, that the rest of the industry eventually copied.

Robert Noyce's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fairchild Semiconductor company
  Co-founded after leaving Shockley Semiconductor with the group known as the traitorous eight 1957
• Monolithic integrated circuit patent
  U.S. Patent 2,981,877 — the silicon design that made mass-produced chips possible 1959
• Intel Corporation company
  Co-founded with Gordon Moore, serving as first chief executive 1968
• Intel 1103 invention
  Intel's first big product, the DRAM chip that ended magnetic-core memory 1970
• Sematech company
  Industry research consortium he led from Austin, countering Japanese competition 1988

• 1949 aged ~22 Graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College in physics and mathematics
• 1953 aged ~26 Finishes a PhD in physics at MIT
• 1956 aged ~29 Joins Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View
• 1957 aged ~30 Leaves with seven colleagues to found Fairchild Semiconductor
• July 1959 aged 31 Files the patent for the monolithic integrated circuit
• 1968 aged ~41 Co-founds Intel with Gordon Moore
• 1975 aged ~48 Steps down as Intel's chief executive
• 1987 aged ~60 Receives the National Medal of Technology from Ronald Reagan
• June 3, 1990 aged 62 Dies of a heart attack in Austin, Texas, at 62

• William Shockley 1910–1989
  Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age. left his lab to start over
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. co-founded Intel with
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. co-credited inventor of the integrated circuit
• Steve Jobs 1955–2011
  Co-founder of Apple who revolutionized personal computing, music, and mobile communications. built on his chips