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118-624: The VWERL's slogan Technology to the People! indicates its mission: to leverage Silicon Valley resources for the advancement of the Volkswagen Groups ' products through technical knowledge and electronics expertise. The VWERL has recently received media attention surrounding its joint victory with Stanford University in the DARPA Grand Challenge , a prize competition for driverless cars . The Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory

236-492: A design flow that engineers use to design, verify, and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Some of the latest EDA tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to help engineers save time and improve chip performance. Integrated circuits can be broadly classified into analog , digital and mixed signal , consisting of analog and digital signaling on the same IC. Digital integrated circuits can contain billions of logic gates , flip-flops , multiplexers , and other circuits in

354-627: A fabrication facility (commonly known as a semiconductor fab ) can cost over US$ 12 billion to construct. The cost of a fabrication facility rises over time because of increased complexity of new products; this is known as Rock's law . Such a facility features: ICs can be manufactured either in-house by integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) or using the foundry model . IDMs are vertically integrated companies (like Intel and Samsung ) that design, manufacture and sell their own ICs, and may offer design and/or manufacturing (foundry) services to other companies (the latter often to fabless companies ). In

472-509: A microchip , computer chip , or simply chip , is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors , resistors , and capacitors . These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon . Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers , smartphones , and televisions , to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted

590-412: A microprocessor will have memory on the chip. (See the regular array structure at the bottom of the first image. ) Although the structures are intricate – with widths which have been shrinking for decades – the layers remain much thinner than the device widths. The layers of material are fabricated much like a photographic process, although light waves in the visible spectrum cannot be used to "expose"

708-524: A synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector . The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similarly named locations , as well as research parks and technology centers with comparable structures all around the world. Many headquarters of tech companies in Silicon Valley have become hotspots for tourism . "Silicon" refers to

826-782: A city of only 50,000 people, "the densest concentration of lawyers" in the United States outside of Washington, D.C. By the year 2000, large law firms from all over the world were rushing to establish offices in the mid-Peninsula region on or near Sand Hill Road, and Silicon Valley law firms had become global trendsetters in that they were the first legal services employers to adopt business casual apparel (in imitation of their startup clients). During this era, lawyers evolved from their relatively narrow conventional role as protectors of intellectual property into business advisers, intermediaries, and dealmakers, and thereby acquired great prominence in Silicon Valley. For young entrepreneurs new to

944-466: A common active area, but there was no electrical isolation to separate them from each other. The monolithic integrated circuit chip was enabled by the inventions of the planar process by Jean Hoerni and p–n junction isolation by Kurt Lehovec . Hoerni's invention was built on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick's work on surface protection and passivation by silicon dioxide masking and predeposition, as well as Fuller, Ditzenberger's and others work on

1062-542: A common substrate in a three-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. Another early proponent of the concept was Geoffrey Dummer (1909–2002), a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence . Dummer presented

1180-441: A computer network, which he imagined as an electronic commons open to all, the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals. As head of IPTO from 1962 to 1964, "Licklider initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking." In 1969,

1298-491: A few square millimeters. The small size of these circuits allows high speed, low power dissipation, and reduced manufacturing cost compared with board-level integration. These digital ICs, typically microprocessors , DSPs , and microcontrollers , use boolean algebra to process "one" and "zero" signals . Among the most advanced integrated circuits are the microprocessors or " cores ", used in personal computers, cell-phones, etc. Several cores may be integrated together in

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1416-408: A layer of material, as they would be too large for the features. Thus photons of higher frequencies (typically ultraviolet ) are used to create the patterns for each layer. Because each feature is so small, electron microscopes are essential tools for a process engineer who might be debugging a fabrication process. Each device is tested before packaging using automated test equipment (ATE), in

1534-428: A number of steps for the p–n junction isolation of transistors on a chip, MOSFETs required no such steps but could be easily isolated from each other. Its advantage for integrated circuits was pointed out by Dawon Kahng in 1961. The list of IEEE milestones includes the first integrated circuit by Kilby in 1958, Hoerni's planar process and Noyce's planar IC in 1959. The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated

1652-420: A process known as wafer testing , or wafer probing. The wafer is then cut into rectangular blocks, each of which is called a die . Each good die (plural dice , dies , or die ) is then connected into a package using aluminium (or gold) bond wires which are thermosonically bonded to pads , usually found around the edge of the die. Thermosonic bonding was first introduced by A. Coucoulas which provided

1770-421: A rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on a single MOS chip by the late 1960s. Following the development of the self-aligned gate (silicon-gate) MOSFET by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC technology with self-aligned gates , the basis of all modern CMOS integrated circuits,

1888-407: A reliable means of forming these vital electrical connections to the outside world. After packaging, the devices go through final testing on the same or similar ATE used during wafer probing. Industrial CT scanning can also be used. Test cost can account for over 25% of the cost of fabrication on lower-cost products, but can be negligible on low-yielding, larger, or higher-cost devices. As of 2022 ,

2006-482: A result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita, although the venture capital ecosystem has grown more geographically decentralized over time. The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States. The unemployment rate of the region

2124-426: A semiconductor to modulate its electronic properties. Doping is the process of adding dopants to a semiconductor material. Since a CMOS device only draws current on the transition between logic states , CMOS devices consume much less current than bipolar junction transistor devices. A random-access memory is the most regular type of integrated circuit; the highest density devices are thus memories; but even

2242-859: A single IC or chip. Digital memory chips and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are examples of other families of integrated circuits. In the 1980s, programmable logic devices were developed. These devices contain circuits whose logical function and connectivity can be programmed by the user, rather than being fixed by the integrated circuit manufacturer. This allows a chip to be programmed to do various LSI-type functions such as logic gates , adders and registers . Programmability comes in various forms – devices that can be programmed only once , devices that can be erased and then re-programmed using UV light , devices that can be (re)programmed using flash memory , and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which can be programmed at any time, including during operation. Current FPGAs can (as of 2016) implement

2360-532: A single die. A technique has been demonstrated to include microfluidic cooling on integrated circuits, to improve cooling performance as well as peltier thermoelectric coolers on solder bumps, or thermal solder bumps used exclusively for heat dissipation, used in flip-chip . The cost of designing and developing a complex integrated circuit is quite high, normally in the multiple tens of millions of dollars. Therefore, it only makes economic sense to produce integrated circuit products with high production volume, so

2478-495: A single layer on one side of a chip of silicon in a flat two-dimensional planar process . Researchers have produced prototypes of several promising alternatives, such as: As it becomes more difficult to manufacture ever smaller transistors, companies are using multi-chip modules / chiplets , three-dimensional integrated circuits , package on package , High Bandwidth Memory and through-silicon vias with die stacking to increase performance and reduce size, without having to reduce

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2596-570: A single-person household was $ 14,891. Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000 : Additional notable companies headquartered in Silicon Valley (some of which are defunct, subsumed, or relocated) include: Silicon Valley has a population of 3.1 million as of 2020. A 1999 study by AnnaLee Saxenian for the Public Policy Institute of California reported that

2714-482: A six-pin device. Radios with the Loewe 3NF were less expensive than other radios, showing one of the advantages of integration over using discrete components , that would be seen decades later with ICs. Early concepts of an integrated circuit go back to 1949, when German engineer Werner Jacobi ( Siemens AG ) filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device showing five transistors on

2832-582: A table while a deal was being discussed?" Silicon Valley firms' board of directors are composed of 15.7% women compared with 20.9% in the S&;P 100. The 2012 lawsuit Pao v. Kleiner Perkins was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by executive Ellen Pao for gender discrimination against her employer, Kleiner Perkins . The case went to trial in February 2015. On March 27, 2015,

2950-462: A third of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers were immigrants and that nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley's high-technology firms since 1980 were run by Chinese (17 percent) or Indian descent CEOs (7 percent). There is a stratum of well-compensated technical employees and managers, including tens of thousands of "single-digit millionaires". This income and range of assets will support a middle-class lifestyle in Silicon Valley. In November 2006,

3068-505: A year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first true monolithic IC chip. More practical than Kilby's implementation, Noyce's chip was made of silicon , whereas Kilby's was made of germanium , and Noyce's was fabricated using the planar process , developed in early 1959 by his colleague Jean Hoerni and included the critical on-chip aluminum interconnecting lines. Modern IC chips are based on Noyce's monolithic IC, rather than Kilby's. NASA's Apollo Program

3186-835: Is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation . Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area , it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley . The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector. The cities of Sunnyvale , Mountain View , Palo Alto and Menlo Park are frequently cited as

3304-608: Is also represented in the number of new companies founded by women as well as the number of women-lead startups that receive venture capital funding. Wadhwa said he believes that a contributing factor is a lack of parental encouragement to study science and engineering. He also cited a lack of women role models and noted that most famous tech leaders—like Bill Gates , Steve Jobs , and Mark Zuckerberg —are men. As of October 2014, some high-profile Silicon Valley firms were working actively to prepare and recruit women. Bloomberg reported that Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft attended

3422-493: Is high because the IC's components switch quickly and consume comparatively little power because of their small size and proximity. The main disadvantage of ICs is the high initial cost of designing them and the enormous capital cost of factory construction. This high initial cost means ICs are only commercially viable when high production volumes are anticipated. An integrated circuit is defined as: A circuit in which all or some of

3540-681: Is obsolete. An early attempt at combining several components in one device (like modern ICs) was the Loewe 3NF vacuum tube first made in 1926. Unlike ICs, it was designed with the purpose of tax avoidance , as in Germany, radio receivers had a tax that was levied depending on how many tube holders a radio receiver had. It allowed radio receivers to have a single tube holder. One million were manufactured, and were "a first step in integration of radioelectronic devices". The device contained an amplifier , composed of three triodes, two capacitors and four resistors in

3658-491: The Brookings Institution . As of June 2021, it also had the highest percentage of homes valued at $ 1 million or more in the United States. Silicon Valley is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations , including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000 , and thousands of startup companies . Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in

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3776-658: The Intel 8080 , the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel . On April 23, 1963, J. C. R. Licklider , the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at The Pentagon 's ARPA issued an office memorandum addressed to Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network . It rescheduled a meeting in Palo Alto regarding his vision of

3894-564: The MITS Altair microcomputer, the first unit sent to the area for review by People's Computer Company . Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs credit that first meeting with inspiring them to design the original Apple I and (successor) Apple II computers. As a result, the first preview of the Apple I was given at the Homebrew Computer Club. Subsequent meetings were held at an auditorium at

4012-539: The Shockley diode ), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive management style, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor ; Shockley referred to them as the " traitorous eight ". Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore , would go on to found Intel . Following

4130-609: The Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park ). Terman invited only high-technology companies. The first tenant was Varian Associates , founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military-radar components. Terman also found venture capital for civilian-technology start-ups. Hewlett-Packard became one of the major success-stories. Founded in 1939 in Packard's garage by Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard , Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into

4248-545: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center . Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software , and user interfaces. Using money from NASA , the US Air Force , and ARPA , Douglas Engelbart invented

4366-531: The Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET , predecessor to the Internet . By the early 1970s, there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. Growth during this era

4484-744: The University of California, Davis released a report analyzing business leadership by women within the state. The report showed that although 103 of the 400 largest public companies headquartered in California were located in Santa Clara County (the most of all counties), only 8.8% of Silicon Valley companies had women CEOs. This was the lowest percentage in the state. (San Francisco County had 19.2% and Marin County had 18.5%.) Silicon Valley tech leadership positions are occupied almost exclusively by men. This

4602-470: The chemical element used in silicon -based transistors and integrated circuit chips, which is the focus of a large number of computer hardware and software innovators and manufacturers in the region. The popularization of the name is often credited to Don Hoefler , the first journalist to use the term in a news story. His article "Silicon Valley U.S.A." was published in the January 11, 1971, issue of

4720-476: The dual in-line package (DIP), first in ceramic and later in plastic, which is commonly cresol - formaldehyde - novolac . In the 1980s pin counts of VLSI circuits exceeded the practical limit for DIP packaging, leading to pin grid array (PGA) and leadless chip carrier (LCC) packages. Surface mount packaging appeared in the early 1980s and became popular in the late 1980s, using finer lead pitch with leads formed as either gull-wing or J-lead, as exemplified by

4838-601: The mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s and 1970s while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), first publicly demonstrated in 1968 in what is now known as The Mother of All Demos . Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI was also involved in launching the ARPANET (precursor to the Internet ) and starting the Network Information Center (now InterNIC ). Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers beginning in

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4956-488: The non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs are spread across typically millions of production units. Modern semiconductor chips have billions of components, and are far too complex to be designed by hand. Software tools to help the designer are essential. Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems , including integrated circuits. The tools work together in

5074-498: The periodic table of the chemical elements were identified as the most likely materials for a solid-state vacuum tube . Starting with copper oxide , proceeding to germanium , then silicon , the materials were systematically studied in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, monocrystalline silicon is the main substrate used for ICs although some III-V compounds of the periodic table such as gallium arsenide are used for specialized applications like LEDs , lasers , solar cells and

5192-544: The small-outline integrated circuit (SOIC) package – a carrier which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent DIP and is typically 70% thinner. This package has "gull wing" leads protruding from the two long sides and a lead spacing of 0.050 inches. In the late 1990s, plastic quad flat pack (PQFP) and thin small-outline package (TSOP) packages became the most common for high pin count devices, though PGA packages are still used for high-end microprocessors . Ball grid array (BGA) packages have existed since

5310-416: The switching power consumption per transistor goes down, while the memory capacity and speed go up, through the relationships defined by Dennard scaling ( MOSFET scaling ). Because speed, capacity, and power consumption gains are apparent to the end user, there is fierce competition among the manufacturers to use finer geometries. Over the years, transistor sizes have decreased from tens of microns in

5428-503: The very large-scale integration (VLSI) of more than 10,000 transistors on a single chip. At first, MOS-based computers only made sense when high density was required, such as aerospace and pocket calculators . Computers built entirely from TTL, such as the 1970 Datapoint 2200 , were much faster and more powerful than single-chip MOS microprocessors such as the 1972 Intel 8008 until the early 1980s. Advances in IC technology, primarily smaller features and larger chips, have allowed

5546-591: The "preprofit" stage. Prior to 1970, most Northern California lawyers were based in San Francisco, especially the experienced patent attorneys whom the high-tech industry needed to protect its intellectual property. During the 1970s, lawyers began to follow venture capitalists down the Peninsula to serve the booming high-tech industry in Silicon Valley. As of 1999, there were 2,400 lawyers practicing law in Palo Alto,

5664-399: The 1959 inventions of the monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild, the first commercial MOS IC was introduced by General Microelectronics in 1964. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , designed and realized by Federico Faggin along with Ted Hoff , Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. In April 1974, Intel released

5782-413: The 1960s, the size, speed, and capacity of chips have progressed enormously, driven by technical advances that fit more and more transistors on chips of the same size – a modern chip may have many billions of transistors in an area the size of a human fingernail. These advances, roughly following Moore's law , make the computer chips of today possess millions of times the capacity and thousands of times

5900-425: The 1970s. Flip-chip Ball Grid Array packages, which allow for a much higher pin count than other package types, were developed in the 1990s. In an FCBGA package, the die is mounted upside-down (flipped) and connects to the package balls via a package substrate that is similar to a printed-circuit board rather than by wires. FCBGA packages allow an array of input-output signals (called Area-I/O) to be distributed over

6018-503: The 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents. Silicon Valley is also home to a significant number of " Unicorn " ventures, referring to startup companies whose valuation has exceeded $ 1 billion dollars . A world-renowned technology hub, San Francisco Bay Area has

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6136-671: The 20th annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference to actively recruit and potentially hire female engineers and technology experts. The same month, the second annual Platform Summit was held to discuss increasing racial and gender diversity in tech. As of April 2015 experienced women were engaged in creation of venture capital firms which leveraged women's perspectives in funding of startups. After UC Davis published its Study of California Women Business Leaders in November 2006, some San Jose Mercury News readers dismissed

6254-482: The 22 nm node (Intel) or 16/14 nm nodes. Mono-crystal silicon wafers are used in most applications (or for special applications, other semiconductors such as gallium arsenide are used). The wafer need not be entirely silicon. Photolithography is used to mark different areas of the substrate to be doped or to have polysilicon, insulators or metal (typically aluminium or copper) tracks deposited on them. Dopants are impurities intentionally introduced to

6372-512: The Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland , the term "Silicon Valley" came to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County and southeastern San Mateo County , and a metonymical definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire Bay Area. The term Silicon Valley is often used as

6490-566: The Stanford Research Park shortly after 1953. In 1954 Stanford originated the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the university on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal-computer manufacturer in

6608-642: The U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto . Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the Navy in 1912. In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale , California, was commissioned by the United States Government for use as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to house

6726-508: The United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation, although the tech ecosystem has recently become more geographically dispersed. It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit , the microprocessor , and the microcomputer , among other technologies, were developed. As of 2021 , the region employed about a half million information technology workers. As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and

6844-507: The United States. A 2023 report found that the aggregate household wealth of Silicon Valley (including ultra-high net worth individuals ) was nearly $ 1.1 trillion, and less than 1% of the Valley's population held 36% of the wealth. Conversely, as of 2021, 23% of Silicon Valley residents were living below the poverty line . However, the meaning of the term "poverty" is dependent upon context; in Silicon Valley, it means something different because of

6962-548: The Valley's mysterious ways, their lawyer often served as their first coach, mentor, teacher, friend, and cheerleader who helped connect them to the Valley's startup ecosystem. As of 2022, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area had the highest average wage for lawyers in the United States, at $ 267,840. The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically minded hobbyists who gathered to trade parts, circuits , and information pertaining to DIY construction of computing devices. It

7080-623: The airship USS Macon in Hangar One . The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field , and between 1933 and 1947, U.S. Navy blimps were based there. A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett Field to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its west coast operations to San Diego , the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, forerunner of NASA ) took over portions of Moffett Field for aeronautics research. Many of

7198-424: The area's high-tech firms. Frederick Terman , as Stanford University's dean of the school of engineering from 1946, encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. In 1951 Terman spearheaded the formation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park , an area surrounding Page Mill Road , south west of El Camino Real and extending beyond Foothill Expressway to Arastradero Road), where

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7316-414: The basis for many electronic developments for decades. Both Frederick Terman and William Shockley are often called "the father of Silicon Valley". Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as

7434-454: The birthplace of Silicon Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California , and the 13th-most populous in the United States . Other major Silicon Valley cities include Santa Clara , Redwood City and Cupertino . The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zürich , Switzerland and Oslo , Norway ), according to

7552-467: The chemicals used in the manufacture of integrated circuits . Technical, engineering, design, and administrative staffs were in large part well compensated. Silicon Valley has a severe housing shortage , caused by the market imbalance between jobs created and housing units built: from 2010 to 2015, many more jobs have been created than housing units built. (400,000 jobs, 60,000 housing units) This shortage has driven home prices extremely high, far out of

7670-719: The circuit elements are inseparably associated and electrically interconnected so that it is considered to be indivisible for the purposes of construction and commerce. In strict usage, integrated circuit refers to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a monolithic integrated circuit , which comprises a single piece of silicon. In general usage, circuits not meeting this strict definition are sometimes referred to as ICs, which are constructed using many different technologies, e.g. 3D IC , 2.5D IC , MCM , thin-film transistors , thick-film technologies , or hybrid integrated circuits . The choice of terminology frequently appears in discussions related to whether Moore's Law

7788-419: The components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force . Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. However, Kilby's invention was not a true monolithic integrated circuit chip since it had external gold-wire connections, which would have made it difficult to mass-produce. Half

7906-473: The desktop Datapoint 2200 were built from bipolar integrated circuits, either TTL or the even faster emitter-coupled logic (ECL). Nearly all modern IC chips are metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistors). The MOSFET invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960, made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits . In contrast to bipolar transistors which required

8024-418: The die must pass through the material electrically connecting the die to the package, through the conductive traces (paths) in the package, through the leads connecting the package to the conductive traces on the printed circuit board . The materials and structures used in the path these electrical signals must travel have very different electrical properties, compared to those that travel to different parts of

8142-536: The diffusion of impurities into silicon. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic substrates (so-called micromodules ), each containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951's Project Tinkertoy). However, as

8260-667: The diversity hire. He described being isolated from his team, and constantly having to prove he could do the job he was hired for. In 2014, tech companies Google , Yahoo! , Facebook , Apple , and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic/Latino . June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce

8378-524: The early 1970s to 10 nanometers in 2017 with a corresponding million-fold increase in transistors per unit area. As of 2016, typical chip areas range from a few square millimeters to around 600 mm , with up to 25 million transistors per mm . The expected shrinking of feature sizes and the needed progress in related areas was forecast for many years by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). The final ITRS

8496-510: The early 1970s. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet , PostScript , and laser printers . While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems , and indirectly to Cisco , Apple Computer , and Microsoft . Apple's Macintosh GUI

8614-581: The early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market. The urbanized area is built upon an alluvial plain within a longitudinal valley formed by roughly parallel earthquake faults. The area between the faults subsided into a graben or dropped valley. Hoefler defined Silicon Valley as the urbanized parts of "the San Francisco Peninsula and Santa Clara Valley". Before

8732-541: The entire die rather than being confined to the die periphery. BGA devices have the advantage of not needing a dedicated socket but are much harder to replace in case of device failure. Intel transitioned away from PGA to land grid array (LGA) and BGA beginning in 2004, with the last PGA socket released in 2014 for mobile platforms. As of 2018 , AMD uses PGA packages on mainstream desktop processors, BGA packages on mobile processors, and high-end desktop and server microprocessors use LGA packages. Electrical signals leaving

8850-580: The equivalent of millions of gates and operate at frequencies up to 1 GHz . Analog ICs, such as sensors , power management circuits , and operational amplifiers (op-amps), process continuous signals , and perform analog functions such as amplification , active filtering , demodulation , and mixing . ICs can combine analog and digital circuits on a chip to create functions such as analog-to-digital converters and digital-to-analog converters . Such mixed-signal circuits offer smaller size and lower cost, but must account for signal interference. Prior to

8968-566: The expansive growth of the tech industry, the region had been the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world up through the 1960s, with 39 fruit canneries. The nickname it had been known as during that period was "the Valley of Heart’s Delight". Silicon Valley was born through the intersection of several contributing factors, including a skilled science research base housed in area universities, plentiful venture capital , permissive government regulation, and steady U.S. Department of Defense spending. Stanford University ’s leadership

9086-545: The field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality. Integrated circuits are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete components, allowing a large transistor count . The IC's mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to integrated circuit design have ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized

9204-459: The first quarter of 2023. More traditional industries also recognize the potential of high-tech development, and several car manufacturers have opened offices in Silicon Valley to capitalize on its entrepreneurial ecosystem . Manufacture of transistors was for a long time the core industry in Silicon Valley. The workforce was for the most part composed of Asian and Latino immigrants who were paid low wages and worked in hazardous conditions due to

9322-412: The foundry model, fabless companies (like Nvidia ) only design and sell ICs and outsource all manufacturing to pure play foundries such as TSMC . These foundries may offer IC design services. The earliest integrated circuits were packaged in ceramic flat packs , which continued to be used by the military for their reliability and small size for many years. Commercial circuit packaging quickly moved to

9440-480: The high cost of living to the success of the industries in this region. Although, this rift between high and low salaries is driving many residents out who can no longer afford to live there. In the Bay Area , the number of residents planning to leave within the next several years has had an increase of 35% since 2016, from 34% to 46%. The wealth inequality in Silicon Valley is more pronounced than in any other region of

9558-568: The highest-speed integrated circuits. It took decades to perfect methods of creating crystals with minimal defects in semiconducting materials' crystal structure . Semiconductor ICs are fabricated in a planar process which includes three key process steps – photolithography , deposition (such as chemical vapor deposition ), and etching . The main process steps are supplemented by doping and cleaning. More recent or high-performance ICs may instead use multi-gate FinFET or GAAFET transistors instead of planar ones, starting at

9676-579: The idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. , on 7 May 1952. He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. Between 1953 and 1957, Sidney Darlington and Yasuo Tarui ( Electrotechnical Laboratory ) proposed similar chip designs where several transistors could share

9794-641: The jury found in favor of Kleiner Perkins on all counts. Nevertheless, the case, which had wide press coverage, resulted in major advances in consciousness of gender discrimination on the part of venture capital and technology firms and their women employees. Two other cases have been filed against Facebook and Twitter. A 2017 study showed that white males made up the majority of higher positions, with 58.7% holding executive positions and 46.5% being managers. The second highest position holders were Asian men, with 16.3% having executive positions and 17.9% being managers. African/Black and Hispanic/Latino people had

9912-543: The knowledge they gained from their previous employer. This gave Silicon Valley an advantage over other American tech hubs such as Massachusetts Route 128 curving around Boston . The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose . Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased

10030-408: The largest concentration of high-tech companies in the United States, at 387,000 high-tech jobs, of which Silicon Valley accounts for 225,300 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary in the United States at $ 144,800. Largely

10148-421: The late 1990s, radios could not be fabricated in the same low-cost CMOS processes as microprocessors. But since 1998, radio chips have been developed using RF CMOS processes. Examples include Intel's DECT cordless phone, or 802.11 ( Wi-Fi ) chips created by Atheros and other companies. Modern electronic component distributors often further sub-categorize integrated circuits: The semiconductors of

10266-530: The lowest percentages in all categories. Harvard Business Review published an article in 2018 discussing diversity and inclusion and gave statistics on black employees along with advice to future black technicians. LeRon L. Barton, a black man who spent over two decades in Tech, gave an insight on his work experiences. He said he saw no one who looked like him in his profession and said he received many comments that he believed disregarded his skill such as being called

10384-722: The new headquarters at Herndon, Virginia . The VWERL supports all brands within the Volkswagen Group . This includes Volkswagen Passenger Cars , Škoda , Bentley , and Bugatti as well as Audi , SEAT , and Lamborghini . In addition to working with research and development teams in Germany , the VWERL also supports the development of U.S. -specific features for the Volkswagen Group of America . The VWERL comprises four teams: The VWERL's headquarters are located at 500 Clipper Drive, Belmont CA. Silicon Valley Silicon Valley

10502-433: The number of MOS transistors in an integrated circuit to double every two years, a trend known as Moore's law. Moore originally stated it would double every year, but he went on to change the claim to every two years in 1975. This increased capacity has been used to decrease cost and increase functionality. In general, as the feature size shrinks, almost every aspect of an IC's operation improves. The cost per transistor and

10620-406: The original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms, such as Lockheed , which was the area's largest employer from the 1950s into 1980s. Stanford University , its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of the culture of collaboration among high-tech companies. A powerful sense of regional solidarity shaped

10738-467: The origins of Silicon Valley firms, including via investments from Fairchild 's eight co-founders. The key investors in Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital were from the same group, directly leading to Tech Crunch 2014 estimate of 92 public firms of 130 related listed firms then worth over US$ 2.1 trillion with over 2,000 firms traced back to them. Another important pillar of the Valley's success

10856-646: The outlook of inventors and engineers in California; contrasting markedly from the insular and competitive environment of engineering firms on the East Coast of the United States . From the 1890s, Stanford University's leaders saw its mission as service to the (American) West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient local industry. Thus regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of

10974-440: The possibility that sexism contributed in making Silicon Valley's leadership gender gap the highest in the state. A January 2015 issue of Newsweek magazine featured an article detailing reports of sexism and misogyny in Silicon Valley. The article's author, Nina Burleigh , asked, "Where were all these offended people when women like Heidi Roizen published accounts of having a venture capitalist stick her hand in his pants under

11092-520: The predecessor to Craigslist began operations. Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble , which started in the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in

11210-493: The project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC. Newly employed by Texas Instruments , Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working example of an integrated circuit on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material … wherein all

11328-549: The range of production workers. As of 2016 a two-bedroom apartment rented for about $ 2,500 while the median home price was about $ 1 million. The Financial Post called Silicon Valley the most expensive U.S. housing region. Homelessness is a problem with housing beyond the reach of middle-income residents; there is little shelter space other than in San Jose which, as of 2015, was making an effort to develop shelters by renovating old hotels. The Economist also attributes

11446-490: The region's severe housing shortage and high housing prices. As of 2023, the low-income poverty threshold set by the California Department of Housing and Community Development for single-person households in the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin was $ 104,400, followed by $ 96,000 for the county of Santa Clara. In contrast, the 2023 national low-income poverty threshold set by the U.S. Census Bureau for

11564-474: The size of the transistors. Such techniques are collectively known as advanced packaging . Advanced packaging is mainly divided into 2.5D and 3D packaging. 2.5D describes approaches such as multi-chip modules while 3D describes approaches where dies are stacked in one way or another, such as package on package and high bandwidth memory. All approaches involve 2 or more dies in a single package. Alternatively, approaches such as 3D NAND stack multiple layers on

11682-427: The speed of the computer chips of the early 1970s. ICs have three main advantages over circuits constructed out of discrete components: size, cost and performance. The size and cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time. Furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance

11800-836: The tech industry, "This is the next step in the civil rights movement" while T. J. Rodgers has argued against Jackson's assertions. According to a 2019 Lincoln Network survey, 48% of high-tech workers in Silicon Valley identify as Christians , with Roman Catholicism (27%) being its largest branch, followed by Protestantism (19%). The same study found that 16% of high-tech workers identify as nothing in particular, 11% as something else, 8% as Agnostics , and 7% as Atheists . Around 4% of high-tech workers in Silicon Valley identify as Jews or Buddhists , 3% as Hindus , 2% as Muslims and 1% as Satanists . The following Santa Clara County cities are traditionally considered to be in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order): Integrated circuit An integrated circuit ( IC ), also known as

11918-607: The university leased portions of its land to high-tech firms. Terman nurtured companies like Hewlett-Packard , Varian Associates , Eastman Kodak , General Electric , Lockheed Corporation , and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford University campus. In 1951, to address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment-opportunities for graduating students, Frederick Terman proposed leasing Stanford's lands for use as an office park named

12036-493: The weekly trade newspaper Electronic News . In preparation for this report, during a lunch meeting with marketing people who were visiting the area, he heard them use the term. Earlier uses outside journalism exist; for example, a May 1970 advertisement in the Peninsula Times Tribune described a Palo Alto company that "helps production people in Silicon Valley." However, the term did not gain widespread use until

12154-400: The world of electronics . Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now essential parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs such as modern computer processors and microcontrollers . Very-large-scale integration was made practical by technological advancements in semiconductor device fabrication . Since their origins in

12272-420: The world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion . The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. After the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 The Wall Street Journal story found that 12 of

12390-524: The world, and transformed the home-printing market when it released the first thermal drop-on-demand ink-jet printer in 1984. Other early tenants included Eastman Kodak , General Electric , and Lockheed . In 1956, William Shockley , the co-inventor of the first working transistor (with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain ), moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California , to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to live closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto . Shockley's work served as

12508-539: Was Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), founded in 1983 by a group of former Bank of America executives. Before its 2023 collapse , SVB specialized in providing banking services to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their startup firms. SVB's original primary commercial lending product was a working capital line of credit , secured by a startup's accounts receivable . In contrast to traditional banks, who focused their commercial lending on already-established businesses, SVB specialized in lending money to small startup companies in

12626-434: Was 9.4% in January 2009 and has decreased to a record low of 2.7% as of August 2019. But in April 2020, when unemployment was at its peak, it stood at 13.7% and has since fallen to 5.7% in July 2021. Silicon Valley received 41% of all U.S. venture investment in 2011, and 46% in 2012. During the period from 2019 to 2021, Silicon Valley's share of U.S. venture capital investment dropped to 35.9%, but had surged back to 41% as of

12744-401: Was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS integrated circuit in 1964, a 120-transistor shift register developed by Robert Norman. By 1964, MOS chips had reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar chips. MOS chips further increased in complexity at

12862-488: Was created to foster startups , giving a boost to entrepreneurs. Northern California was even more welcoming, with a group of venture capitalists actively seeking high-tech business ideas, clustered on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and Palo Alto . California 's civil code undermined the usual non-compete clauses that effectively tied employees to their companies in other states, allowing California workers to freely apply

12980-441: Was developed at Fairchild Semiconductor by Federico Faggin in 1968. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors , as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. This led to the inventions of the microprocessor and the microcontroller by the early 1970s. During the early 1970s, MOS integrated circuit technology enabled

13098-533: Was especially important in the valley's early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success. The United States was more friendly than other countries to business investment, charging much lower taxes on capital gains since the Revenue Act of 1921 , and featuring particularly loose free market controls over new business. In 1953, the Small Business Administration

13216-679: Was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August 2014, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, USA Today published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley—from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms." Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said of improving diversity in

13334-596: Was founded in August 1998, and VWERL began operations in October 1998, with three employees. As of December 2002, the lab had outgrown its Sunnyvale, California office and moved to Palo Alto . In 2011 it moved again to Belmont . This current location provides a spacious office, workshop and prototyping areas for about 60 workers. It supports VWERL employees at Volkswagen Group of America 's offices in Auburn Hills, Michigan , and

13452-459: Was fueled by the emergence of venture capital on Sand Hill Road , beginning with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $ 1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980. Since the 1980s, Silicon Valley has been home to the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world. In 1971, Don Hoefler traced

13570-505: Was issued in 2016, and it is being replaced by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems . Initially, ICs were strictly electronic devices. The success of ICs has led to the integration of other technologies, in an attempt to obtain the same advantages of small size and low cost. These technologies include mechanical devices, optics, and sensors. As of 2018 , the vast majority of all transistors are MOSFETs fabricated in

13688-499: Was largely a result of Steve Jobs ' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford University 's Ethernet campus network . Commercial use of the Internet became practical and grew slowly throughout the early 1990s. In 1995, commercial use of the Internet grew substantially and the initial wave of internet startups, Amazon.com , eBay , and

13806-475: Was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park . They both were interested in maintaining a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone. The first meeting was held as of March 1975 at French's garage in Menlo Park , San Mateo County, California ; which was on occasion of the arrival of

13924-480: Was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965. Transistor–transistor logic (TTL) was developed by James L. Buie in the early 1960s at TRW Inc. TTL became the dominant integrated circuit technology during the 1970s to early 1980s. Dozens of TTL integrated circuits were a standard method of construction for the processors of minicomputers and mainframe computers . Computers such as IBM 360 mainframes, PDP-11 minicomputers and

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