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Silicon Valley lies in the South Bay and the southern Peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area. Once best known for its prune orchards, the area underwent explosive growth with the creation of the high-tech industry in the 1960s. Overview. Map. Directions.
Silicon Valley 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.
Apr 29, 2024 · Find maps of Silicon Valley cities, towns, roads and parks, as well as its location on the California map. Learn about the facts, colleges and universities, and notable companies of Silicon Valley.
- Overview
- Valley of Heart’s Delight
- Terman and Stanford Industrial Park
- From semiconductors to personal computers
Silicon Valley, industrial region around the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, California, U.S., with its intellectual centre at Palo Alto, home of Stanford University. Silicon Valley includes northwestern Santa Clara county as far inland as San Jose, as well as the southern bay regions of Alameda and San Mateo counties. Its name is derived fro...
Early in the 20th century the area now called Silicon Valley was a bucolic region dominated by agriculture and known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” owing to the popularity of the fruits grown in its orchards. It is roughly bounded by San Francisco Bay on the north, the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west, and the Diablo Range on the east. But Sili...
If any single person is responsible for Silicon Valley, it is the electrical engineer and administrator Frederick E. Terman (1900–82). While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Ph.D., 1924), Terman saw how the faculty at Cambridge actively pursued research as well as contact with industry through consulting and the placement of students in corporations. Returning home to Palo Alto in 1925 to join the faculty at Stanford, where he had received his undergraduate degree, Terman realized that Stanford’s electrical engineering department was deficient. At MIT the faculty were experts in a broad range of fields—electronics, power engineering, computing, and communications—all on the leading edge of research. At Stanford the electrical engineering department had a single focus—electric power engineering.
Terman set out to build Stanford into a major centre of radio and communications research. He also encouraged students such as William Hewlett and David Packard (of the Hewlett-Packard Company) and Eugene Litton (of Litton Industries, Inc.) to establish local companies. Terman also invested in these “start-up” enterprises, personally demonstrating his desire to integrate the university with industry in the region.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Terman was made director of Harvard University’s Radio Research Laboratory, which was dedicated to producing radar jamming and other electronic countermeasure technologies. At war’s end he returned to Stanford as dean of engineering, intent on transforming Stanford into a West Coast MIT. First, he selected technologies for research emphasis; given his wartime work on microwave radar, he began with microwave electronics. Second, he solicited military contracts to fund academic research by faculty members who had worked in microwave technology during the war. By 1949 Stanford had become one of the top three recipients of government research contracts, overshadowing all other electronics departments west of the Mississippi River.
In 1951 Terman spearheaded the creation of the Stanford Industrial (now Research) Park, which granted long-term leases on university land exclusively to high-technology firms. Soon Varian Associates, Inc. (now Varian Medical Systems, Inc.), Eastman Kodak Company, General Electric Company, Admiral Corporation, Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Hewlett-Packard Company, and others turned Stanford Research Park into America’s premier high-technology manufacturing region. A mutually beneficial relationship developed: professors consulted with the rent-paying tenants, industrial researchers taught courses on campus, and companies recruited the best students. The park was Silicon Valley in miniature. As more firms moved to the region, fueling demand for basic electronic components, technical skills, and business supplies, many former high-technology employees started their own companies. Long before the personal computer, the start-up was the culture of the Valley.
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In 1956 William Shockley, Nobel Prize-winning coinventor of the transistor, established his new Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the park. Within a year a group of dissatisfied engineers resigned en masse to join with Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation to establish Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in nearby Santa Clara. (Engineers from Fairchild went on to coinvent the integrated circuit in 1958.) This was the first of many corporate fractures that shaped the American semiconductor landscape. Of 31 semiconductor manufacturers established in the United States during the 1960s, only 5 existed outside the Valley; the remainder were the result of different engineers leaving Fairchild.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a fundamental change in the semiconductor market. By 1972 the U.S. military accounted for only 12 percent of semiconductor sales, compared with more than 50 percent during the early 1960s. With the growth in consumer applications, by the mid-1970s venture capitalists had replaced the U.S. government as the primary source of financing for start-ups. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs were quickly establishing firms to supply the semiconductor manufacturers with everything from instruments and measurement equipment to furnaces and cubicle partitions. In Silicon Valley it was possible to establish a corporation, find venture capital, rent space, hire staff, and be in business within a matter of weeks.
- Michael Aaron Dennis
Jan 2, 2021 · Explore the historical evolution of Silicon Valley and other tech hubs through 25 maps from 1945 to 2021. See how the region changed from a rural area to a global center of innovation and commerce, with ads, landmarks, and companies.
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Silicon Valley covers a wide geographic area and points of interest are spread out among several cities. The following map highlights the attractions listed in this guide. What to expect : Visitors are often surprised when they arrive in Silicon Valley.
