PHOTO: RANDI SILBERMAN

The Man Behind the Microchip Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley By Leslie Berlin Oxford University Press New York City 2005, 440 pp., US $30 ISBN 0-19-516343-5 Making Silicon Valley Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 By Christophe Lécuyer The MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. 2005, 424 pp., $40 ISBN 0-262-12281-2

In mid-April 1956, a young Robert Noyce sped cross-country in his car to join his new colleagues at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. He arrived just in time for a raucous party celebrating the company's launch, downed a pitcher of martinis, and promptly passed out.

Blissfully unaware of it then, Noyce was soon to become a central figure in a tectonic shift in American industry. He had just left a position in the aging industrial heartland of the East, where he developed high-frequency germanium transistors at Philadelphia-based Philco Corp., for a far-sighted start-up on the San Francisco Peninsula. Shockley Semiconductor was bent on fabricating transistors in the much more challenging, but promising, element silicon. Later, as head of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in the 1960s and after that Intel Corp., he played a leading role in establishing what became Silicon Valley—still the throbbing heart of the US $200 billion semiconductor industry.

Leslie Berlin has written an engaging biography of Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip. She began the project almost a decade ago as a Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University, in California, and then spent several years expanding her thesis into this book. Thoroughly researched and well written, it offers revealing insights into the life of the man who became an iconic public figure for the industry. The aggressive, charismatic, risk-taking physicist with the broad, infectious smile returns to life in Berlin's easy-to-read narrative. More than anyone else, it was Noyce who spawned the laid-back, egalitarian management style so characteristic of the Valley. He also enjoyed, as he put it, "walking the thin line next to the cliff of disaster."

Noyce learned the new silicon technologies while working for Nobel laureate William Shockley, one of the transistor's inventors, who brought most of the methods west with him from Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, N.J. The young scientists and engineers he hired pushed the limits of the technologies, but they eventually deserted Shockley in 1957 to found their own start-up firm, Fairchild, because they could no longer tolerate his heavy-handed management. At Fairchild in 1959, Noyce conceived and patented the ideas that were to form the basis of integrated-circuit manufacturing.

All that is standard lore, well known to anyone familiar with the history of the semiconductor industry. Much less familiar is the fact that after suggesting that integrated circuits could be made with silicon using the planar manufacturing process, invented by his Fairchild colleague Jean Hoerni, Noyce had little involvement in their subsequent development. Turning Noyce's proposal into a practical process fell to a group headed by Jay Last, another Fairchild founder. Last organized and led a team of scientists and engineers who painstakingly worked out the tools and techniques required to realize Noyce's ideas in silicon—the messy details such as photolithography, precision masking, and electrical isolation of the individual chip components.

Although well aware of that twist, Berlin devotes few pages to it. The focus of her narrative is Noyce, who in March 1959 essentially left the laboratory bench for good, to step in as Fairchild's new general manager. Readers who hunger for more information on the actual development of the microchip should turn to another Stanford Ph.D. dissertation converted into a book: Making Silicon Valley, by Christophe Lécuyer.