Biography | Robert Noyce — The Building on Charleston Road Where Silicon Became a Circuit

People treat the integrated circuit as if it arrived in one flash, in one room, from one man.

It did not.

On 30 July 1959 Fairchild Semiconductor filed U.S. Patent 2,981,877 in Robert Noyce's name.

The title was "Semiconductor device-and-lead structure."

The work sat in this building at 844 East Charleston Road, on the line between Palo Alto and Mountain View.

The eight engineers who had left William Shockley's laboratory two years earlier rented the empty 14,000-square-foot shell in October 1957.

They were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, and Noyce.

Each put in 500 dollars. Sherman Fairchild's camera company put up the rest and took the option to buy them out.

Jean Hoerni showed Noyce an improved version of his planar process on 14 January 1959.

The oxide film on the silicon could take evaporated metal lines instead of flying wires.

Noyce's application described a complete circuit — transistors, resistors, interconnections — formed in a single piece of silicon.

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments had filed a related structure months earlier, in germanium, with gold wires still doing the connections.

The two names now share the invention.

Later litigation favored Noyce's planar method as the one industry could manufacture at volume.

Fairchild's first working planar integrated circuits came off the line here in 1960.

The patent issued on 25 April 1961 as the first granted anywhere in the integrated-circuit field.

California Historical Landmark 1000 and an IEEE milestone plaque stand in front of the building.

The state text names this site, in 1959, as the place of the first commercially practicable integrated circuit.

The original shell is still on Charleston Road. The process that left it is in every planar chip made since.

Photo: Dick Lyon, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons (Fairchild building).
Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Noyce, 1959).