Robert Noyce

Did You Know?

• Noyce's first wife was Elizabeth Bottomley, a 1951 graduate of Tufts University; they had four children and divorced in 1974.
• His second wife, Ann Schmeltz Bowers, was the first director of personnel for Intel and the first vice president of human resources for Apple Inc.
• The Noyce Foundation, founded in 1990 by his family, dedicated itself to improving K-12 math and science education and ended operations in 2015.

Early life

Robert Noyce was the third of four boys born to Reverend Ralph Brewster Noyce and Harriet May Norton in Burlington, Iowa. His father, a Rhodes Scholarship nominee, held degrees from Doane College, Oberlin College, and the Chicago Theological Seminary. His mother, an Oberlin graduate, had originally wanted to be a missionary; journalist Tom Wolfe called her “an intelligent woman with a commanding will.” Noyce’s brother Donald became a UC Berkeley professor and associate dean, and Robert later established a prize in his name for undergraduate teaching.

Another brother, Gaylord, taught practical theology at Yale Divinity School and was arrested in 1961 for joining the Freedom Riders. At age five, after beating his father at ping pong, Noyce was upset when his mother suggested his father had let him win. “If you’re going to play, play to win!” he insisted. When he was twelve, he and his brother built a small aircraft and flew it off the Grinnell College stables roof.

He also built a radio from scratch and attached a propeller and motor from an old washing machine to his sled. Although his parents were religious, Noyce later became agnostic and irreligious.

Education

Noyce grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, and showed talent in mathematics and science in high school, taking the Grinnell College freshman physics course as a senior. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and entered Grinnell College that fall. He was the star diver on the 1947 Midwest Conference Championship swim team and also sang, played the oboe, and acted. In his junior year, he stole a 25-pound pig from the Grinnell mayor's farm for a school luau; the mayor threatened felony charges, but Noyce's physics professor and college president Grant Gale negotiated a compromise: the college compensated the mayor, and Noyce was suspended for one semester.

He returned in February 1949, graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in physics and mathematics, and received the Brown Derby Prize for earning the best grades with the least work. A course taught by Grant Gale, who showed two of the first Bell Labs transistors, sparked Noyce's fascination with physics. Gale suggested he apply to MIT, where Noyce earned a doctorate in physics in 1953; his quick mind earned him the nickname 'Rapid Robert.'

Career

After earning his doctorate from MIT in 1953, Noyce worked as a research engineer at Philco Corporation in Philadelphia. In 1956 he joined William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California. The following year, Noyce left with the 'traitorous eight' due to issues with Shockley's management and co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Sherman Fairchild was persuaded to create the semiconductor division by Noyce's impassioned presentation.

In 1959, after Jack Kilby invented the first hybrid integrated circuit in 1958, Noyce independently invented the monolithic integrated circuit, made of silicon and using aluminum lines to connect components on a single chip. This design, based on Jean Hoerni's planar process (which itself relied on Mohamed Atalla's silicon surface passivation and thermal oxidation methods), was more practical than Kilby's germanium chip and could be mass-produced.

Patents

Robert Noyce held 15 patents, listed in the order they were granted. His earliest, 'Method and apparatus for forming semiconductor structures,' was filed in August 1954 and issued in February 1959, assigned to Philco Corporation. Other early patents include 'Transistor structure and method' (filed April 1957, issued March 1960, assigned to Beckman Instruments) and 'Semiconductor scanning device' (filed June 1959, issued November 1960, assigned to Fairchild Semiconductor).

A key patent, 'Semiconductor Device and Lead Structure,' was filed in July 1959 and issued in April 1961, also assigned to Fairchild. Later patents include 'Field effect transistor' (filed January 1958, issued November 1961, assigned to Clevite Corporation), 'Method for fabricating transistors' (filed June 1959, issued October 1963, assigned to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.), and 'Semiconductor circuit complex having isolation means' (filed September 1959, issued September 1964, assigned to Fairchild Camera).

His final patent, 'Trainable system,' was filed in October 1964 and issued in June 1967, assigned to Fairchild Camera. In 1960, Clevite Corporation acquired Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a Beckman Instruments subsidiary where Noyce had worked.