Shockley Press Release
9/20/05
CONTACT:
Leslie Berlin, Silicon valley Archives at Stanford: (650)
736-2010, lberlin@stanford.edu
Relevant Web URLs:
The Stanford Silicon Valley Archives
http://svarchive.stanford.edu/newsandevents.html
Discussion to Mark 50th Anniversary
of
Shockley
Semiconductor Lab
The founding fathers of the semiconductor industry will discuss
the birth of Silicon Valley at Stanford on Sept. 27, in recognition
of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Shockley Semiconductor
Lab. The event, which will take place on campus from 5:30 to 7:00
p.m. in the Bender Room of Green Library (5th floor, Bing Wing),
is free and open to the public.
Fifty years ago this month, silicon began its
journey to the region that would one day be dubbed “Silicon Valley” in its
honor. On Sept. 3, 1955, William Shockley—the Nobel Prize-winning
co-inventor of the transistor who enticed Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce,
Eugene Kleiner and more than a dozen other of the world’s
top young semiconductor researchers to come to the San Francisco
Bay Area to work for him—signed the contract that launched
the valley’s first all-silicon research lab-cum-company:
Shockley Semiconductor Lab.
To mark the anniversary, several of the founding
fathers of the semiconductor industry, the solid state program
at Stanford, and Silicon Valley—many of whom worked at Shockley’s lab—are
meeting at Stanford for a panel discussion. They will discuss the
early years of the valley, what it was like to work for Shockley,
how their experiences in Shockley’s lab influenced their
own career decisions and whether Silicon Valley would look
the way it does today if Shockley had not recruited them to
come to the area.
Panelists include:
Jay Last—co-founder, Fairchild Semiconductor;
co-founder, Amelco-Teledyne
Julius Blank—co-founder, Fairchild Semiconductor;
founder, Xicor
Jim Gibbons—Reid Dennis Professor of Electrical
Engineering at Stanford, special counsel to the president for
industry relations
Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives
at Stanford, will moderate the event. She is the author of The
Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon
Valley.
