Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the
San Francisco Bay AreaThe San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
in
Northern CaliforniaNorthern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations. The term originally referred to the region's large number of
silicon chipAn integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and the
worldWorld is a common name for the whole of human civilization, specifically human experience, history, or the human condition in general, worldwide, i.e. anywhere on Earth....
, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for 1/3 of all of the
venture capitalVenture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
investment in the United States. Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the
Santa Clara ValleyThe Santa Clara Valley is a valley just south of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California in the United States. Much of Santa Clara County and its county seat, San José, are in the Santa Clara Valley. The valley was originally known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration...
including the city of
San JoseSan Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
(and adjacent communities), the southern
PeninsulaThe San Francisco Peninsula is a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area that separates the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. On its northern tip is the City and County of San Francisco. Its southern base is in Santa Clara County, including the cities of Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Mountain...
, and the southern
East BayThe East Bay is a commonly used, informal term for the lands on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, United States...
.
Origin of the term
The term
Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Central California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to
Don HoeflerDon C. Hoefler was an American journalist who coined the term "Silicon Valley". His friend Ralph Vaerst suggested the name "Silicon Valley" in a series of articles entitled "Silicon Valley, USA" in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News starting on January 11, 1971.From the mid 1970s until his...
, a friend of Vaerst's, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade
newspaperA newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
Electronic NewsElectronic News was a publication that covered the semiconductor production equipment industry. It was originally a weekly trade newspaper, which covered all aspects of the electronics industry including semiconductors, computers, software, communications, space and even television...
. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley in the USA," began in the paper's issue dated January 11, 1971.
Valley refers to the
Santa Clara ValleyThe Santa Clara Valley is a valley just south of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California in the United States. Much of Santa Clara County and its county seat, San José, are in the Santa Clara Valley. The valley was originally known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration...
, located at the southern end of
San Francisco BaySan Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean...
, while
SiliconSilicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. A tetravalent metalloid, it is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon, the nonmetal directly above it in the periodic table, but more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table...
refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the
semiconductorA semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...
(silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially) and
computerA computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
industries that were concentrated in the area. These firms slowly replaced the
orchardAn orchard is an intentional planting of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit or nut-producing trees which are grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive...
s which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
History
Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to an electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics.
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of this area. Some examples include the work of
Lee De ForestLee De Forest was an American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use...
with his invention of a pioneering vacuum tube called the
AudionAn Audion is a wireless signal detector device invented by Lee De Forest in 1906.Audion may also refer to:* Audion , an electronic music album by Larry Fast* Audion , a media player for Apple Macintosh created by Panic...
and the oscilloscopes of
Hewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
.
A powerful sense of regional solidarity accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the 1890s, Stanford University's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development.
During the 1940s and 1950s,
Frederick TermanFrederick Emmons Terman was an American academic. He is widely credited with being the father of Silicon Valley.-Education:...
, as Stanford's dean of engineering and provost, encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. He is credited with nurturing
Hewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
,
Varian AssociatesVarian Associates was one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1948 by Russell H. and Sigurd F. Varian, William Webster Hansen, and Edward Ginzton to sell the klystron, the first tube which could generate electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies, and other...
, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford campus. Terman is often called "the father of Silicon Valley."
During 1955-85, solid state technology research and development at Stanford University followed three waves of industrial innovation made possible by support from private corporations, mainly Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Xerox PARC. In 1969 the
Stanford Research InstituteSRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...
(now SRI International), operated one of the four original nodes that comprised
ARPANETThe Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
, predecessor to the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
.
Social roots of information technology revolution
It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the
microprocessorA microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed, and has been the site of electronic innovation for over four decades, sustained by about a quarter of a million
information technologyInformation technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
workers. Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with the Defense Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
Roots in radio and military technology
The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of
U.S. NavyThe United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
research and technology. In 1909,
Charles HerroldCharles David 'Doc' Herrold, was an American radio broadcasting pioneer who in 1909 created the world's second radio station....
started the first
radioRadio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in
San JoseSan Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
. Later that year,
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for
Poulsen arcThe arc converter, sometimes called the arc transmitter or Poulsen arc after its inventor Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen, is a device that used an electric arc to convert direct current electricity into radio frequency alternating current...
radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the U.S. Navy in 1912.
In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California, was commissioned by the United States Government for use as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to house the airship
USS MaconUSS Macon was a rigid airship built and operated by the United States Navy for scouting. She served as a "flying aircraft carrier", launching Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk biplane fighters. In service for less than two years, in 1935 Macon was damaged in a storm and lost off California's Big Sur coast,...
in
Hangar OneHangar One is one of the world's largest freestanding structures, covering , and has long been one of the most recognizable landmarks of California's Silicon Valley. An early example of mid-century modern architecture, it was built in the 1930s as a naval airship station for the USS Macon.-Design...
. The station was renamed NAS
Moffett FieldMoffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale, California, USA. The airport is near the south end of San Francisco Bay, northwest of San Jose. Formerly a United States Navy facility, the former...
, and between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here. A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its West Coast operations to
San DiegoSan Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...
,
NACAThe National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a U.S. federal agency founded on March 3, 1915 to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958 the agency was dissolved, and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and...
(the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of
NASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
) took over portions of Moffett Field for
aeronauticsAeronautics is the science involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of airflight-capable machines, or the techniques of operating aircraft and rocketry within the atmosphere...
research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with
aerospaceAerospace comprises the atmosphere of Earth and surrounding space. Typically the term is used to refer to the industry that researches, designs, manufactures, operates, and maintains vehicles moving through air and space...
firms such as
LockheedThe Lockheed Corporation was an American aerospace company. Lockheed was founded in 1912 and later merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin in 1995.-Origins:...
.
Stanford Industrial Park
After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students,
Frederick TermanFrederick Emmons Terman was an American academic. He is widely credited with being the father of Silicon Valley.-Education:...
proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park, named the Stanford Industrial Park (later
Stanford Research ParkStanford Research Park is a technology park located in Palo Alto, California on land owned by Stanford University. Built in 1951, as Stanford Industrial Park, it claims to be the world's first technology-focused office park...
). Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was
Varian AssociatesVarian Associates was one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1948 by Russell H. and Sigurd F. Varian, William Webster Hansen, and Edward Ginzton to sell the klystron, the first tube which could generate electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies, and other...
, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found
venture capitalVenture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
for civilian technology start-ups . One of the major success stories was
Hewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
. Founded in
Packard's garageThe HP Garage is a private museum where the company Hewlett-Packard was founded. It is located at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California. It is considered to be the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley"...
by Stanford graduates
William HewlettWilliam Redington Hewlett was an engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company . He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan where is father taught at the Univerisy of Michigan Medical School...
and
David PackardDavid Packard was a co-founder of Hewlett-Packard , serving as president , CEO , and Chairman of the Board . He served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1969–1971 during the Nixon administration...
, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953. In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home printing market when it released the first ink jet printer in 1984. In addition, the tenancy of
Eastman KodakEastman Kodak Company is a multinational imaging and photographic equipment, materials and services company headquarted in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded by George Eastman in 1892....
and
General ElectricGeneral Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1990s.
Silicon transistor and birth of the Silicon Valley
In 1953,
William ShockleyWilliam Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...
left
Bell LabsBell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the
transistorA transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
. After returning to
California Institute of TechnologyThe California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California in 1956, and founded
Shockley Semiconductor LaboratoryShockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the primary lab of the Shockley Transistor Company, was the first company to work on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley. It was purchased by Clevite in 1960, and officially closed shortly after being sold to ITT in 1968...
. Unlike many other researchers who used
germaniumGermanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is a lustrous, hard, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors tin and silicon. The isolated element is a semiconductor, with an appearance most similar to elemental silicon....
as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that
siliconSilicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. A tetravalent metalloid, it is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon, the nonmetal directly above it in the periodic table, but more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table...
was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the
Shockley diodeThe Shockley diode is a four layer semiconductor diode which was one of the first semiconductor devices invented. It was a "pnpn" diode...
), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive management style,
eightThe Traitorous Eight, as they became known, are eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. More neutral terms include the "Fairchild Eight" and the "Shockley Eight." They have sometimes been called "Fairchildren," although this term has been also...
engineers left the company to form
Fairchild SemiconductorFairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...
, Shockley referred to these eight engineers as the "Traitorous Eight." Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor,
Robert NoyceRobert Norton Noyce , nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968...
and
Gordon MooreGordon Earle Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law .-Life and career:...
, would go on to found
IntelIntel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
.
Law firms
The rise of Silicon Valley was also bolstered by the development of appropriate legal infrastructure to support the rapid formation, funding, and expansion of high-tech companies, as well as the development of a critical mass of litigators and judges experienced in resolving disputes between such firms. From the early 1980s onward, many national (and later international)
law firmA law firm is a business entity formed by one or more lawyers to engage in the practice of law. The primary service rendered by a law firm is to advise clients about their legal rights and responsibilities, and to represent clients in civil or criminal cases, business transactions, and other...
s opened offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto in order to provide Silicon Valley startups with legal services. Furthermore,
California lawCalifornia law consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law.-Constitutional law:...
has a number of quirks which help entrepreneurs establish startups at the expense of established firms, such as a nearly absolute ban on
non-compete clauseA non-compete clause , or covenant not to compete , is a term used in contract law under which one party agrees not to pursue a similar profession or trade in competition against another party . As a contract provision, a CNC is bound by traditional contract requirements including the...
s in employment agreements.
Venture capital firms
By the early 1970s, there were many
semiconductorA semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...
companies in the area,
computerA computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the
venture capitalVenture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
industry on
Sand Hill RoadSand Hill Road is a road in Menlo Park, California, notable for its concentration of venture capital companies. Its significance as a symbol of private equity in the United States may be compared to that of Wall Street in the stock market...
, beginning with
Kleiner PerkinsKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers ' is a world-leading venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal has called it one of the "largest and most established" venture capital firms in the world...
in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.
The rise of software
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.
Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's
Augmentation Research CenterStanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line...
declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding,
XeroxXerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs),
EthernetEthernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
,
PostScriptPostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
, and laser printers.
While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to
3Com3Com was a pioneering digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw...
and
Adobe SystemsAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
, and indirectly to
CiscoCisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...
,
Apple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
and
MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of
Steve JobsSteven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.
Internet bubble
Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the
dot-com bubbleThe dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the
NASDAQThe NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
stock marketA stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...
began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time,
Sand Hill RoadSand Hill Road is a road in Menlo Park, California, notable for its concentration of venture capital companies. Its significance as a symbol of private equity in the United States may be compared to that of Wall Street in the stock market...
was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe
traffic congestionTraffic congestion is a condition on road networks that occurs as use increases, and is characterized by slower speeds, longer trip times, and increased vehicular queueing. The most common example is the physical use of roads by vehicles. When traffic demand is great enough that the interaction...
.
Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006
The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
story found that 12 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
Economy
According to a 2008 study by
AeAThe AeA was a nationwide non-profit trade association that represented all segments of the technology industry...
in 2006, Silicon Valley was the third largest high-tech center (cybercity) in the United States, behind the
New York metropolitan areaThe New York metropolitan area, also known as Greater New York, or the Tri-State area, is the region that composes of New York City and the surrounding region...
and
Washington metropolitan areaThe Washington Metropolitan Area is the metropolitan area centered on Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. The area includes all of the federal district and parts of the U.S...
, with 225,300 high-tech jobs. The Bay Area as a whole however, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first with 387,000 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary at $144,800. Largely a result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita.
The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States. The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009, up from 7.8% in the previous month.
Notable companies
Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the
Fortune 1000Fortune 1000 is a reference to a list maintained by the American business magazine Fortune. The list is of the 1000 largest American companies, ranked on revenues alone...
:
- Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
- Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
- Agilent Technologies
Agilent Technologies , or Agilent, is a company that designs and manufactures electronic and bio-analytical measurement instruments and equipment for measurement and evaluation...
- Apple Inc.
- Applied Materials
Applied Materials, Inc. is a capital equipment producer serving the semiconductor, TFT LCD display, Glass, WEB and solar manufacturing industries....
- Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
- eBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
- Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
- Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
- Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
- Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American software company that develops financial and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants and individuals...
- Juniper Networks
Juniper Networks is an information technology and computer networking products multinational company, founded in 1996. It is head quartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA. The company designs and sells high-performance Internet Protocol network products and services...
- KLA Tencor
KLA-Tencor Corporation is a supplier of process control and yield management solutions for the semiconductor and related microelectronics industries. These technologies serve the semiconductor, data storage, LED, photovoltaic, and other related nanoelectronics industries...
- LSI Logic
- Marvell Semiconductors
- Maxim Integrated Products
Maxim Integrated Products is a publicly traded company that designs, manufactures, and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products. Maxim develops integrated circuits for the industrial, communications, consumer, and computing markets....
- Morabito Corporation (M-Corporation)
- National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer, that specialized in analog devices and subsystems,formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The products of National Semiconductor included power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers,...
- NetApp
- Nvidia
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
- Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
- Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...
- SanDisk
SanDisk Corporation is an American multinational corporation that designs, develops and manufactures data storage solutions in a range of form factors using the flash memory, controller and firmware technologies. It was founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari and Sanjay Mehrotra, non-volatile memory...
- Sanmina-SCI
- Symantec
Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
- Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):
- 3Com
3Com was a pioneering digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw...
(acquired by HP)
- A10 Networks
A10 Networks is a privately held company specializing in the manufacture of application delivery controllers . Founded in 2004 by Lee Chen, co-founder of Foundry Networks, A10 originally serviced just the identity management market with its line of ID Series products...
- Actel
Actel Corporation is a manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power FPGAs, mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions...
- Actiontec Electronics
- Actuate Corporation
Actuate Corporation is a San Mateo, California based Public Computer software company. Actuate is the founder and co-leader of the Eclipse BIRT open source project, a development environment for "presenting compelling data visualizations"...
- Adaptec
Adaptec is a computer hardware brand owned by PMC-Sierra that is used on some of its host adapters for connecting storage devices to computers. The production line of Adaptec is in Indonesia. Products are made to interface with SCSI, Serial ATA, and Serial attached SCSI. Some of its host adapters...
- Aeria Games and Entertainment
Aeria Games, based in Santa Clara, California, is an online games publisher. Aeria Games & Entertainment Inc. , a subsidiary of Aeria Inc. in Japan, is developing an Internet gaming portal for MMORPGs in the U.S. It focuses on massively multiplayer online role-playing games, licensing games from ...
- Altera
Altera Corporation is a Silicon Valley manufacturer of PLDs . The company offered its first programmable logic device in 1984. PLDs can be reprogrammed during the design cycle as well as in the field to perform multiple functions, and they support a fairly fast design process...
- Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
's A9.comA9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search engine technology. A9 currently has over 100 employees in its Palo Alto, Bangalore, and Dublin offices.A9 has worked in 3 areas over the years....
- Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
's Lab126.comLab126, Inc is a small, Cupertino, California-based subsidiary of Amazon.com, best known for developing Amazon's Kindle device. Lab126 is led by Gregg Zehr. In addition to the Kindle, Lab126 is developing other "easy-to-use, highly integrated consumer products to serve Amazon customers"....
- Amdahl
Amdahl Corporation is an information technology company which specializes in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products. Founded in 1970 by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu since 1997...
- Ampex
Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...
- Antibody Solutions
Antibody Solutions is an American biotechnology company specializing in antibody development and manufacture, immunoassay development and other biotechnological and biomedical research. The company serves pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and biomedical research organizations...
- Aricent
Aricent Group is a global innovation and technology services company. The company develops software and provides technology services to application, infrastructure, and service providers with operations in 19 countries worldwide....
- Asus
ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated is a multinational computer technology and consumer electronics product manufacturer headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. Its product range includes motherboards, desktops, laptops, monitors, tablet PCs, servers and mobile phones...
- Atari
Atari, Inc. was an American video game and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Primarily responsible for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries, the company was closed and its assets split in 1984 as a direct result of the North...
- Atmel
Atmel Corporation is a manufacturer of semiconductors, founded in 1984. Its focus is on system-level solutions built around flash microcontrollers...
- Broadcom
Broadcom Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los...
- Brocade Communications Systems
Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. , based in Silicon Valley , is a vendor of storage area network hardware and software. The company also designs, manufactures, and sells networking products and management applications for local, metro, and wide area networks...
- BEA Systems
BEA Systems, Inc. specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products known as "middleware", which connect software applications to databases and was acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.- History :...
(acquired by Oracle CorporationOracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
)
- Business Objects
SAP Business Objects is a French enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence . Since 2007, it has been a part of SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers worldwide in its final earnings release...
(acquired by SAPSAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...
)
- Cypress Semiconductor
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor design and manufacturing company founded by T. J. Rodgers and others from Advanced Micro Devices. It was formed in 1982 with backing by Sevin Rosen and went public in 1986. The company initially focused on the design and...
- Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...
- EMC Corporation
EMC Corporation , a Financial Times Global 500, Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, develops, delivers and supports information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure hardware, software, and services. EMC is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA.Former Intel executive Richard Egan and his...
(headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts)
- E*TRADE (headquartered in New York, NY)
- Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
- Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...
- Force10
Force10 Networks , is a United States company which develops and markets 10 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches for computer networking to corporate, educational, and governmental customers. It has offices in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region.In 2011 Dell announced that they...
- Foundry Networks
Foundry Networks, Inc. was a networking hardware vendor selling high-end Ethernet switches and routers. The company was founded in 1996 by Bobby R. Johnson, Jr. and was headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA...
- Fujitsu
is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
(headquartered in Tokyo, Japan)
- Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems is a company providing mid-range and high-end storage systems, software and services. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. and part of the Hitachi Information Systems & Telecommunications Division....
- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., it is expected to be sold to Western Digital in third calendar quarter 2011. Hitachi GST developed hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and external storage solutions and services used to store,...
- IBM Almaden Research Center (headquartered in Armonk, New York)
- IDEO
IDEO is an international design and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, California, United States with other locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich, Shanghai, and Singapore, as well as Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo. The company helps design products, services,...
- Intuitive Surgical
Intuitive Surgical Inc. is a corporation that manufactures robotic surgical systems, most notably the da Vinci Surgical System. The da Vinci Surgical System allows surgery to be performed remotely using robotic manipulators. The company is part of the Nasdaq-100 and S&P 500...
- LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
- Logitech
Logitech International S.A. is a global provider of personal peripherals for computers and other digital platforms headquartered in Romanel-sur-Morges, Switzerland. The company develops and markets products like peripheral devices for PCs, including keyboards, mice, microphones, game controllers...
- LynuxWorks
LynuxWorks, Inc. is a San Jose, California software company founded in 1988. LynuxWorks produces embedded operating systems and tools for using full virtualization and paravirtualization in embedded systems...
- Maxtor
Maxtor Corporation, founded in 1982 and acquired by Seagate Technology in 2006, was an American manufacturer of computer hard disk drives, the third largest in the world immediately prior to acquisition...
(acquired by SeagateSeagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
)
- McAfee
McAfee, Inc. is a computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. It markets software and services to home users, businesses and the public sector. On August 19, 2010, electronics company Intel agreed to purchase McAfee for $7.68 billion...
(acquired by Intel)
- Memorex
Memorex began as a computer tape producer and expanded to become a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It is now a consumer electronics brand of Imation specializing in disk recordable media for CD and DVD drives, flash memory, computer accessories and other electronics.Established in...
(acquired by ImationImation is a US based multi-national technology corporation that designs, manufactures and sells recordable data storage media, consumer electronics products and accessories.The company is a 1996 spin off of 3M and is headquartered in Oakdale, Minnesota...
and moved to Cerritos, CaliforniaCerritos is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, and is one of several cities that constitute the Gateway Cities of southeast Los Angeles County. It was incorporated on April 24, 1956...
)
- Micron Technology
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American multinational corporation based in Boise, Idaho, USA, best known for producing many forms of semiconductor devices. This includes DRAM, SDRAM, flash memory, SSD and CMOS image sensing chips. Consumers may be more familiar with its consumer brand Crucial...
(headquartered in Boise, IdahoBoise is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho, as well as the county seat of Ada County. Located on the Boise River, it anchors the Boise City-Nampa metropolitan area and is the largest city between Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon.As of the 2010 Census Bureau,...
)
- Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
(headquartered in Redmond, WashingtonRedmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 54,144 at the 2010 census,up from 45,256 in 2000....
)
- Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
- Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
(headquartered in Espoo, Finland)
- Netflix
Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California...
- Netscape (acquired by AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
)
- NeXT Computer, Inc.
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
(acquired by AppleApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
)
- Ning
- NXP Semiconductors
- Olivetti
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, printers and other business machines.- Founding :The company was founded as a typewriter manufacturer in 1908 in Ivrea, near Turin, by Camillo Olivetti. The firm was mainly developed by his son Adriano Olivetti...
(headquartered in IvreaIvrea is a town and comune of the province of Turin in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. Situated on the road leading to the Aosta Valley , it straddles the Dora Baltea and is regarded as the centre of the Canavese area. Ivrea lies in a basin that, in prehistoric times, formed a great lake...
, ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
)
- Opera Software
Opera Software ASA is a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers with over 220 million users worldwide. Opera Software is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C. The company has its headquarters in Oslo, Norway and is...
(headquartered in OsloOslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...
, NorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
)
- OPPO
Oppo may refer to:*Cipriano Efisio Oppo , Italian painter.*Opposition research*OPPO Digital, electronics manufacturer...
- Palm, Inc.
Palm, Inc., was a smartphone manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that was responsible for products such as the Pre and Pixi as well as the Treo and Centro smartphones. Previous product lines include the PalmPilot, Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, Zire and Tungsten. While their older...
(acquired by HP)
- PalmSource, Inc. (acquired by ACCESS
, founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in Tokyo, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa, is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, video game consoles and set top boxes....
)
- PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
(now part of eBayeBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
)
- Philips Lumileds Lighting Company
Philips Lumileds Lighting Company is the manufacturer of a wide range of high-power/high-efficiency light-emitting diodes . It is a now a fully owned division of Philips Lighting.-History:...
- Playdom
Playdom is an online social network game developer popular on Facebook and on MySpace; it is currently the largest social game developer on MySpace and one of the larger ones on Facebook. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao...
- PlayPhone
PlayPhone is a mobile phone content provider based in San Jose, California, United States. PlayPhone's main line of business is distributing mobile games, ring tones, wallpaper, videos and other personalized content for mobile phones...
- Qualcomm, Inc.
- Quantcast
Quantcast is a California based company that provides publishers and marketers with the ability to understand, deliver and reach their best audiences at a massive scale...
- Rambus
Rambus Incorporated , founded in 1990, is a technology licensing company. The company became well known for its intellectual property based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.- History :...
- Riverbed Technology
Riverbed Technology is a technology company that specializes in improving the performance of networks and networked applications. It was founded May 23, 2002 by Jerry Kennelly and Steve McCanne in San Francisco, California where its world headquarters remains...
- ROBLOX
Roblox is a massively multiplayer online game virtual playground and workshop designed for children aged 7 and over. Players can build games with blocks of various shapes, sizes, and materials. Roblox users can code the places they design with a restricted and sandboxed version of Lua 5.1...
- RSA
RSA, the security division of EMC Corporation, is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States, and maintains offices in Australia, Ireland, Israel, the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong and Japan....
(acquired by EMCEMC Corporation , a Financial Times Global 500, Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, develops, delivers and supports information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure hardware, software, and services. EMC is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA.Former Intel executive Richard Egan and his...
)
- Redback Networks
Redback Networks was a telecommunications equipment company, specializing in hardware and software used by ISPs to manage broadband services. In December 2006, Ericsson and Redback announced they had signed a definitive agreement under which Ericsson would acquire Redback...
(acquired by EricssonEricsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...
)
- Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...
- SAP AG
SAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...
(headquartered in WalldorfWalldorf is a town in the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis of Baden-Württemberg in Germany.Walldorf is currently probably best known as the city that headquarters the world's third largest software company SAP, but it is also the birthplace of the millionaire John Jacob Astor, at the time of his death the...
, Germany)
- Siemens
Siemens may refer toSiemens, a German family name carried by generations of telecommunications industrialists, including:* Werner von Siemens , inventor, founder of Siemens AG...
(headquartered in BerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and MunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany)
- Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
- Silicon Image
- Solectron
Solectron Corporation was a global electronics manufacturing company for original equipment manufacturers . It pioneered the electronics manufacturing services industry in 1977 and was a leader in the field...
(acquired by FlextronicsFlextronics International Ltd. is an electronics manufacturing services provider that offers services to original equipment manufacturers . It also provides supporting supply chain services, including packaging and transportation throughout the world, as well as design and after-sales...
)
- Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
(headquartered in Tokyo, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
, JapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
)
- Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB is a joint venture established on October 1, 2001 by the Japanese consumer electronics company Sony Corporation and the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson to manufacture mobile phones....
- SRI International
SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...
- Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
(acquired by Oracle CorporationOracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
)
- SunPower
SunPower Corporation designs and manufactures high-efficiency crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, roof tiles and solar panels based on a silicon all-back-contact solar cell invented at Stanford University. SunPower Corporation is publicly traded on the NASDAQ as SPWRA and SPWRB...
- Tibco Software
TIBCO Software Inc. is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. TIBCO manages information, decisions, processes and applications in real-time for over 4,000 customers worldwide...
- Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors, Inc. is a Silicon Valley-based company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain components. It was the only automaker building and selling a zero-emission sports car, the Tesla Roadster, in serial production...
- TheWallvideo Productions
- TWiT
Twit may refer to: A person of lesser intelligence, it is normally used in a humors way.*Idiot, a mentally deficient or self-defeating person*TWiT.tv, a podcast network**This Week in Tech , a podcast on the previously-listed network...
- Tellme Networks
Tellme. Networks, Inc. is a company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, based out of Mountain View, California, in the United States, that specializes in telephone-based applications....
(acquired by Microsoft)
- TiVo
TiVo is a digital video recorder developed and marketed by TiVo, Inc. and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "Season Pass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList"...
- VA Software (Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
)
- WebEx
WebEx Communications Inc. is a Cisco company that provides on-demand collaboration, online meeting, web conferencing and videoconferencing applications...
(acquired by Cisco SystemsCisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
)
- Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation is one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world. It has a long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker and a storage products company. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970 by Alvin B...
- VeriSign
Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...
- Veritas Software
Veritas Software Corp. was an international software company that was founded in 1983 as Tolerant Systems, renamed Veritas Software Corp. in 1989, and merged with Symantec in 2005. It was headquartered in Mountain View, California...
(acquired by SymantecSymantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
)
- VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
- Vocera
- Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. is a supplier of programmable logic devices. It is known for inventing the field programmable gate array and as the first semiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model....
- YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
(acquired by GoogleGoogle Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
)
- Zoran Corporation
Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech superstore retail chain
Fry's ElectronicsFry's Electronics is a big-box store and retailer of software, consumer electronics, computer hardware, with in store computer repair and custom computer building services and household appliances with a chain of superstores headquartered in Silicon Valley...
.
Notable government facilities
- Moffett Federal Airfield
Moffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale, California, USA. The airport is near the south end of San Francisco Bay, northwest of San Jose. Formerly a United States Navy facility, the former...
- NASA Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center , is one of the United States of America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration 10 major field centers.The centre is located in Moffett Field in California's Silicon Valley, near the high-tech companies, entrepreneurial ventures, universities, and other...
- Onizuka Air Force Station
Onizuka Air Force Station was a United States Air Force installation in Santa Clara County, California, just outside the city limits of Sunnyvale, at the intersection of U.S. Route 101 and State Route 237...
Universities and colleges
- San José State University
San Jose State University is a public university located in San Jose, California, United States...
- San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
- Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
- Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University is a private, not-for-profit, Jesuit-affiliated university located in Santa Clara, California, United States. Chartered by the state of California and accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, it operates in collaboration with the Society of Jesus , whose...
- John F. Kennedy University
John F. Kennedy University is a nonprofit, private university located in Pleasant Hill, California, with satellite campuses in Campbell, Berkeley, and Costa Mesa. It was founded in 1964 to focus on providing continuing opportunities for non-traditional higher education. Enrollment is approximately...
Campbell Campus
- University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
Extension
- University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...
Extension
- Hult International Business School
Hult International Business School is a business school with operations in the Boston area, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai, offering several business-related degree programs, including MBA, Master and undergraduate degrees.The school is accredited by the New England Association of...
- Carnegie Mellon University (Silicon Valley campus)
- Golden Gate University
Golden Gate University is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational university located in the South of Market district, immediately south of the Financial District of downtown San Francisco, California...
Silicon Valley Campus
- Silicon Valley University
Silicon Valley University is a private, non-profit, higher educational institution located in San Jose, California, US. The university has been accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools , at master's degree level, since 2003.Silicon Valley University was first...
- University of Phoenix
The University of Phoenix is a for-profit institution of higher learning. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apollo Group Inc. which is publicly traded , an S&P 500 corporation based in Phoenix, Arizona...
San Jose Campus
- University of San Francisco
The University of San Francisco , is a private, Jesuit/Catholic university located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California and the tenth-oldest university of...
South Bay Campus
- Lincoln Law School of San Jose
Lincoln Law School of San Jose is a private, non-profit law school in San Jose, California. It is an independent institution, formerly a part of Lincoln University.-History:The school traces its roots to 1919 when Dr...
- University of Silicon Valley Law School
The University of Silicon Valley Law School is registered with the California Committee of Bar Examiners as a private law school with offices located in Gilroy, California...
- San Jose City College
San Jose City College, founded in 1921, is a community college located in the city of San Jose, Santa Clara County, California.San Jose City College was originally called San Jose Junior College and operated in downtown San Jose, California...
- Menlo College
Menlo College, often referred to as Menlo, is a private, four-year baccalaureate college specializing in business located in the Silicon Valley town of Atherton, California.-Campus:...
- Evergreen Valley College
Evergreen Valley College is a community college located on in the southeastern foothills of San José, Santa Clara County, California. As of Fall 2008, more than 8,000 students from more than 70 countries were enrolled....
- Foothill College
Foothill College is a community college located in Los Altos Hills, California and is part of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. It was founded on January 15, 1957 by Founding Superintendent and President Dr. Calvin C. Flint.-History:...
- De Anza College
De Anza College is a community college located in Cupertino, California. It was founded in 1967 on the site of the Beaulieu Winery and is named after the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza...
- Mission College
- West Valley College
West Valley College is a community college in northern California. Founded in 1963, the campus is located on in the city of Saratoga. One of the distinguishing features of the school's location is that it is located right off of the West Valley Freeway....
- National Hispanic University
The National Hispanic University is a small, private university located in East San Jose, California. The university is nonsectarian and coeducational with 700 undergraduate students...
- Ohlone College
Ohlone College is a community college located in Fremont, California. It was established in 1965. Ohlone College is a single college, multi campus district serving the areas of Fremont, Newark, and Union City with its main campus and district office in Fremont...
- Cogswell Polytechnical College
- The Art Institute of California – Sunnyvale
Cities
A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):
- Campbell
Campbell is a city in Santa Clara County, California, a suburb of San Jose, and part of Silicon Valley, in the San Francisco Bay Area. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, Campbell's population is 39,349...
- Cupertino
Cupertino is an affluent suburban city in Santa Clara County, California in the U.S., directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 58,302 at the time of the 2010 census. Forbes...
- Los Altos
Los Altos is a city at the southern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 28,976 according to the 2010 census....
- Los Altos Hills
Los Altos Hills is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 7,922 at the 2010 census. Located in Silicon Valley, Los Altos Hills is one of the wealthiest cities in the nation.-Strictly residential:...
- Los Gatos
The Town of Los Gatos is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 29,413 at the 2010 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area at the southwest corner of San Jose in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains...
- Milpitas
Milpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is a suburb of the major city of San Jose, California. It is located with San Jose to its south and Fremont to its north, at the eastern end of State Route 237 and generally between Interstates 680 and 880 which run roughly north/south...
- Monte Sereno
Monte Sereno is a city in Santa Clara County, California, USA. The population was 3,341 at the 2010 census. The city is located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 10 miles southwest of San Jose and is immediately northwest of Los Gatos. The city is named for the 2249 ft...
- Mountain View
- Morgan Hill
Morgan Hill is a city located in the southern part of Santa Clara County, California, United States. Founded on November 10, 1906, the city was named after Hiram Morgan Hill, a San Franciscan who built a country retreat home there in 1884...
- Palo Alto
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
- San Jose
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
- Santa Clara
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...
- Saratoga
Saratoga is a city in Santa Clara County, California, USA. It is located on the west side of the Santa Clara Valley, directly west of San Jose, in the San Francisco Bay area. The population was 29,926 at the 2010 census....
- Sunnyvale
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...
Cities sometimes associated with the region:
- East Palo Alto
East Palo Alto is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States.-Overview:As of the 2010 census, the population of East Palo Alto was 28,155. It is situated on the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly halfway between the cities of San Francisco and San Jose...
(San Mateo County)
- Foster City
Foster City is an affluent planned city located in San Mateo County, California, 94404. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 30,567. Forbes ranked Foster City #10 on their 2009 list of America's Top 25 Towns to Live Well. Money has also recognized Foster City multiple times as...
- Fremont
Fremont is a city in Alameda County, California. It was incorporated on January 23, 1956, from the merger of five smaller communities: Centerville, Niles, Irvington, Mission San Jose, and Warm Springs...
(Alameda County)
- Menlo Park
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
(San Mateo County, location of some venture capital companies)
- Newark
Newark is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. It was incorporated as a city in September 1955. Newark is an enclave, completely surrounded by the city of Fremont. Its population was 42,573 at the 2010 census.-Geography:...
(Alameda County)
- Redwood City
Redwood City is a California charter city located on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California, approximately 27 miles south of San Francisco, and 24 miles north of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans from its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people, to its tradition as a port for...
(San Mateo County, home to Oracle, Electronic Arts and PDI/DreamWorks)
- San Francisco
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
(San Francisco County, home to Quantcast, Twitter and Zynga)
- San Mateo, California
San Mateo is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of approximately 100,000 , it is one of the larger suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, located between Burlingame to the north, Foster City to the east, Belmont to the south,...
(San Mateo County; YouTube was founded here; home to SolarCity, NetSuite among others)
- Scotts Valley
Scotts Valley is a small city in Santa Cruz County, California, United States, about thirty miles south of downtown San Jose and six miles north of Monterey Bay, in the upland slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 11,580...
(Santa Cruz County, home to Seagate Technology among others)
See also
- List of attractions in Silicon Valley
- List of places with "Silicon" names
- List of research parks around the world
- List of technology centers around the world
- Microcomputer revolution
The microcomputer revolution is a phrase used to describe the rapid advances of microprocessor-based computers from esoteric hobby projects to a commonplace fixture of homes in industrial societies...
- Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicon Valley is a 1999 made-for-television film directed by Martyn Burke and based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. The film documents the impact on the development of the personal computer of the rivalry between...
— Movie about the early development of Microsoft and Apple.
- Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition , is a San Jose, California based research and advocacy group that promotes safe environmental practices in the high tech industry...
- Sustainable Silicon Valley
Sustainable Silicon Valley is a collaboration of businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations that are identifying and addressing environmental and resource pressures in Silicon Valley....
(SSV)
- Silicon Border
Silicon Border is a development tailored to the specific needs of high-technology manufacturing and is situated in Mexicali, along the western border of the United States of America and Mexico. The aim of the manufacturing park, which began in 2004, is to transform Mexicali into the world's next...
- San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it...
, sometimes erroneously called "Silicon Valley"
- Titanium Valley
Titanium Valley is a planned special economic zone in Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals Federal District of Russia, which will focus on creating titanium products for the aircraft, automotive, shipbuilding and medical industries. It will be created around the world's largest titanium producer,...
- Optics Valley
Optics Valley is a nickname for a region in southern Arizona, centered on Tucson, that includes a concentration of optics companies, spawned by the optics work at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences...
- Silicon Wadi
Silicon Wadi is an area with a high concentration of high-tech industries in the coastal plain in Israel, similar to Silicon Valley in California, in the United States. Silicon Wadi is considered second in importance only to its Californian counterpart...
- Silicon Roundabout
Old Street Roundabout is located on the boundary of the London Borough of Hackney and the London Borough of Islington, and is an interchange system at the junction of Old Street and City Road...
Further reading
- Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 by Christophe Lécuyer, MIT Press (2006)
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/Doubleday...
by Steven LevySteven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1984)
- A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet by Arun Rao and Piero Scaruffi, Omniware Press (2010), ISBN 097655318X
- Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era, Dennis Hayes
Dennis Hayes was the founder of Hayes Microcomputer Products, a maker of modems mostly known for introducing the Hayes command set which has subsequently been used in most modems produced to this day....
, London: Free Association BooksFree Association Books is an innovative project started in 1980s London. It arose as the brainchild of Bob Young and colleagues, who, disillusioned by the decline of the liberatory movement, began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation...
(1989)
- Silicon Valley, Inc.: Ruminations on the Demise of a Unique Culture, The San Jose Mercury News (1997)
- Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. A. English-Lueck, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002)
- The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press (2003)
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff, Viking (2005)
- Silicon Follies: A Dot. Comedy, Thomas Scoville
Thomas Scoville . American humorist, technologist and author best known for chronicling the rise and fall of Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom....
, Pocket Books (2000)
- The Silicon Boys: And Their Valleys Of Dreams, David A. Kaplan, Harper Perinneal (April 2000), ISBN 0-688-17906-1
- Cities of knowledge: Cold War science and the search for the next Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (2005)
- Accidental Empires
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date , is a book written by Mark Stephens under the pen name Robert X. Cringely about the founding of the personal computer industry and the history of Silicon Valley...
: How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can't get a date, Robert X. CringelyRobert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.- Biography :...
, Addison-Wesley Publishing, (1992), ISBN 0-201-57032-7
- Silicon Valley: 110 Year Renaissance, John McLaughlin, Leigh Weimers, Ward Winslow, Santa Clara Valley Historical Association (2008), ISBN 096492174X
- Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, McGraw-Hill (1984)
- Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian, Harvard University Press (1996), ISBN 0674753402
- Clusters of Creativity: Enduring Lessons on Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Silicon Valley and Europe's Silicon Fen by Rob Koepp, John Wiley (2002), ISBN 0471496049
- The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson, Random House (1999), ISBN 0375502777
External links