Silicon Valley

1、Silicon ValleyHangar One at the US Naval Air Station, Sunnyvale, CA Historic District (Moffet Field), designed to house airship dirigibles, displays the military interest in Santa Clara County as well as the adaptive uses for technology the valley is famous forPhotograph by Judith Silva, courtesy of

2、 the City of Santa ClaraSilicon Valley is a nickname for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California, USA. It encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the San Francisco Peninsula and East Bay. It reaches approxim

3、ately from Menlo Park (on the peninsula) and the Fremont/Newark area in the East Bay down through San Jose, centered roughly on Sunnyvale.The termThe term Silicon Valley was coined by journalist Don C. Hoefler in 1971. Silicon refers to the high concentration of semiconductor and computer-related in

4、dustries in the area; Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley.The term may also be applied to surrounding areas on both sides of San Francisco Bay into which many of these industries have expanded.For many years in the 1970s and 1980s it was also incorrectly called Silicone Valley, mostly by journal

5、ists, before the name became commonplace in American culture.HistoryThe location of the high tech industry in the valley was due largely to two men, William Shockley and Frederick Terman.Terman, a professor at Stanford University, decided that a vast area of unused Stanford land was perfect for real

6、-estate development, and set up a program to encourage students to stay in the area by finding them venture capital. One of the major success stories of the program was that it convinced two students to stay in the area, William Hewlett and David Packard. Hewlett-Packard would go on to be one of the

7、 first "high tech" firms in the area that were not directly related to NASA or the US Navy.In 1951 the program was again expanded with the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park, a series of small industrial buildings that were rented out at very low costs to technical companies. In 1954

8、, the Honors Cooperative Program, today known as the co-op, was established 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

9、 in order to cover the costs. By the mid-1950s the infrastructure for what would later allow the creation of "the valley" was in a nascent stage due to Terman's efforts.It was in this atmosphere that a former Californian decided to move to the area. William Shockley had quit Bell Labs

10、in 1953 in a disagreement over the way the transistor had been presented to the public which, due to patent concerns, led to his name being sidelined in favor of his co-inventors, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain. After divorcing his wife, he returned to the California Institute of Technology

11、 where he had received his Bachelor of Science degree, but in 1956 moved to Mountain View, California to create the Shockley Semiconductor as part of Beckman Instruments and to live closer to his aging mother.There he intended to one-up the transistor with a new three-element design (today known as

12、the Shockley diode) that he felt would take over the market, but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. As the project ran into difficulty, Shockley became more and more paranoid. He demanded lie detector tests on the staff, posted their salaries

13、publicly, and generally annoyed everyone. The straw that broke the camel's back occurred when he flew into a rage when a secretary cut her finger, an event he claimed was an intended attack on himself. When it was later demonstrated the cut was from a broken thumbtack the damage was already done

14、, and in 1957 eight of the talented engineers he had brought to the west coast left and formed Fairchild Semiconductor.Over the next few years this pattern would repeat itself several times, as engineers lost control of the companies they started to outside management, and they then left to form the

15、ir own companies. AMD, Signetics, National Semiconductor, and Intel all started as offshoots from Fairchild, or alternatively as offshoots of other offshoots.By the early 1970s the entire area was filled with semiconductor companies, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service co

16、mpanies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO

17、 of Apple Computer in December 1980.Notable companiesThousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Forbes 500:Adobe Systems | Advanced Micro Devices | Agilent | Altera | Apple Computer | Applied Materials | BEA Systems | Cadence Des

18、ign Systems | Cisco Systems | eBay | Electronic Arts | Hewlett-Packard | Intel | Intuit | Juniper Networks | Knight-Ridder | Maxtor | National Semiconductor | Network Appliance | Oracle Corporation | Siebel | Sun Microsystems | Symantec | Synopsys | Veritas Software | Yahoo!Additional notable compan

19、ies headquartered in Silicon Valley include:Adaptec | Atmel | Cypress Semiconductor | Google Inc. | Handspring | McAfee | NVIDIA Corporation | Palm, Inc. | PalmOne, Inc. | PayPal | Rambus | Silicon Graphics | TiVo | VerisignBefitting its heritage, Silicon Valley is home to the high-tech superstore chain Fry's Electronics.UniversitiesSan Jose State University Santa Clara University Stanford University University of California, B