Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley (also known as Silicon Valley) is the name given to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, in northern of California, United States. The region whose name comes from the Santa Clara Valley, includes the southern half of the San Francisco peninsula, roughly stretching from Menlo Park to San Jose and whose center would be located in Sunnyvale. However, with the rapidly increasing number of technology-related jobs in the San Francisco metropolitan area, Silicon Valley's traditional borders have expanded northward to include San Mateo County and the City of San Francisco..
Originally the name was related to the large number of innovators and manufacturers of silicon chips made there, but it definitely ended up referring to all the high-tech businesses established in the area; today it is used as a metonym for the high-tech sector of the United States (in the Hollywood manner for American cinema).
Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers in the United States and around the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading center for high-tech innovation and development, receiving one-third (1/3) of the total venture capital investment in the United States, from companies such as JASD.
Toponymy
The term Silicon Valley was coined by journalist Don C. Hoefler in 1971. Silicon refers to the high concentration of industries in the area, related to with semiconductors and computers; Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, although it could also be applied to the surrounding areas, on both sides of the bay, into which many of these industries have expanded.
For many years in the 1970s and 1980s it was incorrectly called Silicone. It is still mistranslated today as "Silicone Valley".
History
"Perhaps, the strongest current linking the past and the present of the Valley are the desire to "play" with innovative technology, which, combined with a significant contribution to creating the nerve centre we see in the Valley today."
The location of high-tech industries in the valley was largely due to William Shockley and Frederick Terman.
Terman, a professor at Stanford University, considered that a vast vacant tract of university property would be perfect for real estate and intellectual development and established a program to incentivize graduate students to stay there by providing them with investment capital. risk. One of the main successes in the history of the program was that it managed to convince two graduates: William Hewlett and David Packard, who would form the Hewlett-Packard company, which would become one of the first technology firms that were not directly related to the NASA or the US Navy.
In 1951 the program was expanded again, creating the "Stanford Industrial Park" (Stanford Industrial Park in English), which consists of a series of small industrial buildings that were rented at very low cost to technical companies. The Honors Cooperative Program, now called coop, was instituted in 1954 to enable full-time employees of companies to earn college degrees by studying part-time. The first companies signed five-year agreements in which they established that they would pay double the tuition for each student to cover expenses. Towards the mid-50s the structure of what would later allow the creation of the "valley" it was on an ascendant stage thanks to Terman's efforts.
The silicon transistor and the birth of Silicon Valley
It was in this atmosphere that a former Californian decided to move there. William Shockley, who had left Bell Labs in 1953 over a disagreement over how the transistor had been presented to the public, since patent interests had pushed his name into the background in favor of co-inventors John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain. After divorcing his wife, he returned to the California Institute of Technology where he graduated with a science degree, but moved to Mountain View to create Shockley Semiconductor as part of Beckman Instruments and live closer to his father.
Unlike other researchers who used germanium as a semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was a better material for making transistors. Shockley set out to improve the transistor with a three-element design (now known as the Shockley diode) that would be commercially successful, but the design was considerably more difficult to construct than the conventional design. As the project went through various difficulties, Shockley became increasingly paranoid; demanded that employees take a lie detector test, announced their salaries publicly, antagonizing the public in general, and in 1957, Shockley decided to finish work on the silicon transistor, all factors that helped lead to the fact that in 1957, eight of the most brilliant engineers, whom he himself had hired, left him to form the Fairchild Semiconductor company. Shockley called them the "traitorous eight." Two of the original Fairchild Semiconductor group employees, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would in turn go on to found Intel.
During the following years this fact would be repeated several times; As engineers lost control of the companies they created into the hands of outside management, they abandoned them to form their own companies. AMD, Signetics, National Semiconductor, and Intel emerged as offspring of Fairchild or, in other cases, offspring of offspring.
In the early 1970s, the entire area was filled with semiconductor companies that supplied computer companies and these two, in turn, supplied programming and service companies. Industrial space was plentiful and housing still cheap. Growth was fueled by the rise of the Sand Hill Road venture capital industry founded by Kleiner Perkins in 1972; The availability of this capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion takeover bid for Apple Computer in December 1980. It is one of the richest companies in the world.
In Europe, the concept equivalent to Silicon Valley is technology parks, which are spaces specifically created for technology companies. In Europe there are many of them, especially in the vicinity of the largest cities.
Renamed companies
Not a few high-tech companies have established their headquarters in Silicon Valley; the following list are some of those featured in the Forbes 500:
Adobe Systems, Agilent, Altera, AMD, Apple Inc., Applied Materials, BEA Systems, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Ebay, Electronic Arts, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Maxtor, Microchip Technology Inc., National Semiconductor, Network Appliance, Nimsoft, Oracle Corporation, Siebel Systems, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Synopsys, Veritas Software, Yahoo!, Informática, Informática Corporation, Tesla Motors, NVIDIA Corporation, PayPal, Facebook, RAPPI, Twitter, VMware.
There are also other companies, which, although they may not be on the above list, are also recognized and are located in Silicon Valley:
Adaptec, Alphabet Inc., Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, Flextronics, Handspring, Intermedia.NET, Kaboodle, McAfee, Infolink, Palm, Inc., Rambus, Silicon Graphics, Tivo,Verisign.
Universities
- University of Berkeley - It is not really located in the "Silicon Valley", but on the opposite side of San Francisco Bay, but it is renowned for the resources dedicated to research, and its graduates.
- San José State University
- University of Santa Clara
- Stanford University
- San José City College - Community College
Cities
Some of the Silicon Valley cities (in alphabetical order):
- Alvisopero is not entirely true.
- Atherton
- Belmont
- Burlingame
- Campbell
- Cupertino
- Foster City
- Fremont
- Hillsborough
- The High
- The Cats
- Menlo Park
- Millbrae
- Monte Sereno
- Mountain View
- Milpitas
- Newark
- Palo Alto
- Redwood City
- San Carlos
- San José
- San Mateo
- San Francisco
- Santa Clara
- Saratoga
- Sunnyvale
- Union City
- Woodside
- Nicky City