Noyce, Robert

Noyce, Robert (Norton)

(born Dec. 12, 1927, Burlington, Iowa, U.S.—died June 3, 1990, Austin, Texas) U.S. engineer. He received a Ph.D. from MIT. In 1957 he launched Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the first electronics firms in what came to be called Silicon Valley. Simultaneously but independently, he and Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit computer chip in 1959. With his colleague Gordon Moore, he founded Intel Corporation. in 1968. In 1988 Noyce became president of Sematech, Inc., a research consortium formed and financed jointly by industry and the U.S. government to keep the U.S. semiconductor industry at the forefront of semiconductor manufacturing technology.