Biography | Robert Noyce — The Quonset Lot on San Antonio Road He Walked Out Of

The original shed is gone. The address is not.

In early 1956 Robert Noyce left Philco in Philadelphia and joined William Shockley's new laboratory at 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View.

Shockley had shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the transistor and had come west to make silicon devices.

Noyce, with a 1953 MIT doctorate in physical electronics, headed the transistor group.

On 14 August 1956 he wrote a negative-resistance diode into his lab notebook here.

Shockley told him to drop it and keep the staff on a four-layer diode Shockley preferred.

Eight of the younger scientists asked Arnold Beckman, who funded the lab, to replace Shockley as manager.

Beckman refused.

On 18 September 1957 Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, and Noyce resigned and took backing from Sherman Fairchild.

They opened a few blocks away, at 844 East Charleston Road.

The first commercially practicable planar integrated circuit was filed from that next building two years later.

The San Antonio structure later became a produce market and was demolished.

A sidewalk circuit of oversized semiconductor packages now marks the lot, with an IEEE milestone calling the site the place silicon device work began in what became Silicon Valley.

Noyce learned diffusion and silicon process here. He also learned when to leave.

Photo: Dick Lyon (Dicklyon), 2017-2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (391 San Antonio Road memorial).