The Story of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley refers to the southern region of San Francisco Bay Area in North California of the United States. Today, it is often considered as the world's high technology center which is home for many famous companies.

The term 'Silicon Valley' originally referred to the large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers who settled in the region. But, it is now generally regarded as the American high-tech sector. Geographically, Silicon Valley includes the Santa Clara Valley, the city of San Jose, southern peninsula, and the southern East Bay. It is said that the region was initially nicknamed as the Valley of Heart's Delight.

Stanford University which itself located in the Silicon Valley is considered a major institue which shaped the creation of the Silicon Valley. Many leading companies like Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo! were initiated by the Stanford faculty or its alumni. It is worthwhile to mention here that there are several other universities in the valley as well.

The incident which marked the birth of Silicon Valley is an interesting one. William Shockley who became the chief inventor of the transistor while working in Bell Labs left the institute in 1953 due to a disagreement regarding the invention. Then, he founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike most other researchers, Shockley favoured in using Silicon in transistors. After sometime, eight engineers who worked under Shockley left the company and formed the Fairchild Semiconductor company. Later, Two of original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel. Development of such Silicon related industries paved the way for the 'Silicon Valley'.

Today, thousands of notable companies like Adobe, Amazon.com, AMD, Apple, Cisco, eBay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Fujitsu,  Google, HP, Intel, Mozilla, Nvidia, Oracle, Symantec, VMware Yahoo!, Youtube have their heaquaters in Silicon Valley.