PHOTO: INTEL CORP.

More than anyone else, it was Noyce who spawned the laid-back, egalitarian management style so characteristic of the Valley

Various authors have emphasized the importance of Stanford, and particularly of its entrepreneurial provost, Frederick Terman, in promoting the rise of Silicon Valley. Not Lécuyer. In a dry, scholarly book, he stresses instead the gradual accumulation on the Peninsula of unrivaled manufacturing expertise, especially in product and process engineering. This trend emerged before World War II with the fabrication of high-power electron tubes and afterward shifted into microwave-tube manufacturing at companies such as Litton Industries and Varian Associates.

Lécuyer thus argues a solid high-tech industrial base already existed by the mid-1950s, when Shockley, Noyce, and other talented recruits such as Gordon E. Moore arrived to work on advanced silicon devices.

If Lécuyer has a hero, it is Hoerni, the Swiss-born physicist, educated at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, who pioneered the planar process, in which impurities are diffused into the silicon surface to create the various electrical regions in a semiconductor device. He expounds at length on Hoerni's conception and development of the technique, which Lécuyer boldly dubs "the most important innovation in the history of the semiconductor industry."

Those are daring, perhaps reckless words. What about the transistor and integrated circuit? But they reveal the lens through which Lécuyer views semiconductor history. He focuses on production engineering rather than bold ideas and brilliant conceptions. Industrial innovations occur in the laboratory and on the shop floor as much as—or maybe even more than—in the minds of such "great men" as Noyce and Shockley.

Another unsung microchip hero who finally gets his due in Lécuyer's book is Last, who headed the team that developed Fairchild's Micrologic series of integrated circuits, the first ICs to reach the market. Along with Noyce, Last pioneered the use of photolithography to imprint intricate patterns of impurities and aluminum on the silicon surface. To fabricate microchips using the planar process required precise optical masks aligned to what was then almost incredible accuracy. With a deep understanding of physical optics, Last led the way. He also developed his own approach to electrical isolation of the individual chip components, but here Noyce's original suggestion—to use pairs of p-n junctions—eventually won out.

By the time the Micrologic devices became available in March 1961, however, Last and Hoerni were no longer at Fairchild. They had left the company in late January to start Amelco Semiconductor, bringing with them other Fairchild cofounders and members of the IC development team. Half a year later, several remaining team members abandoned Fairchild to found yet another start-up, Signetics Corp. These were the first in a long series of Fairchild spin-offs—often called the "Fairchildren"—that seeded the fertile Valley with entrepreneurial new firms pursuing silicon technologies and manufacturing methods that the parent company had initiated but was not motivated to pursue. Last and Hoerni departed largely because they felt the company was not sufficiently interested in microchips, compared with its existing product lines of transistors and diodes. They formed Amelco to focus on integrated circuits. For the next few years, according to Lécuyer, it was Amelco and Signetics that advanced the frontiers of microchip manufacturing.

When it came to selling microchips to skeptical engineers, however, Fairchild had no equal. To Berlin, it was Noyce who paved the way, as he combined his boyish charm with a pioneering savvy to open lucrative commercial markets for the company's semiconductor devices in computers and other electronics. Lécuyer credits the Fairchild marketing department and its systems engineers, who designed complex circuitry using its devices and literally gave the designs to customers. Both authors agree that Noyce made the key strategic decision to slash microchip prices in 1964, selling them for less than manufacturing costs. This drastic move undercut and effectively crushed such competitors as Signetics, helping Fairchild dominate the microchip market.

There is much more to both books, including Noyce's central role in founding Intel with Moore after leaving Fairchild in 1968 and his later years as semiconductor industry spokesman. But after reading these two fine books in tandem, I am left with the nagging feeling that a more accurate title for Berlin's would have been The Man Who Sold the Microchip. Of course, selling is an important aspect of making, or manufacturing, as anybody who has ever run a production company has learned—except perhaps William Shockley.