Biography | Robert Noyce — Pronounced Dead Minutes After He Reached This Hospital

On the morning of 3 June 1990 Robert Noyce finished a swim at his Austin house and suffered a heart attack.

He was 62.

An ambulance brought him to Seton Medical Center at 1201 West 38th Street.

Hospital staff pronounced him dead minutes after arrival, at about 10 a.m., according to UPI and the Seattle Times that day.

He had moved to Austin in 1988 as the first president of Sematech.

The consortium of fourteen U.S. chip makers and the federal government had an annual budget of about 200 million dollars.

Its purpose was to recover manufacturing ground lost to Japanese producers.

Gordon Moore's National Academy of Engineering tribute records that Noyce died suddenly at his Austin home and that he had lived there since taking the Sematech post.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all dated the death to 3 June 1990 and named this hospital as the place he was pronounced dead.

His house is not the pin. The hospital is the public last address the obituaries recorded.

A lifelong swimmer and a former Iowa state diving champion, he was also a chronic smoker.

The cause was a myocardial infarction.

The planar silicon circuit he had filed from Charleston Road in 1959 was already in the machines that carried the news.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Noyce with Moore and Grove, 1978).