Discussion to mark 50th anniversary of Shockley Semiconductor Lab

The founding fathers of the semiconductor industry will discuss the birth of Silicon Valley at a Stanford panel on Sept. 27, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Shockley Semiconductor Lab. The event, which will take place on campus from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in the Bender Room of Green Library (5th floor, Bing Wing), is free and open to the public.

Fifty years ago this month, silicon began its journey to the region that would one day be dubbed "Silicon Valley" in its honor. On Sept. 3, 1955, William Shockley—who enticed Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Eugene Kleiner and more than a dozen other of the world's top young semiconductor researchers to come to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for him—signed the contract that launched the valley's first all-silicon research lab-cum-company: Shockley Semiconductor Lab. In 1956, Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in physics as co-inventor of the transistor.

To mark the anniversary, several of the founding fathers of the semiconductor industry, the solid state program at Stanford, and Silicon Valley—many of whom worked at Shockley's lab—are meeting at Stanford for a panel discussion. They will discuss the early years of the valley, what it was like to work for Shockley, how their experiences in Shockley's lab influenced their own career decisions and whether Silicon Valley would look the way it does today if Shockley had not recruited them to come to the area.

Panelists will include:

Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, will moderate the event. She is the author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.

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