Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip — an essential component of nearly all modern ...

The Yin and Yang sign. All painstakingly selected and etched onto a microchip that measures about an inch square. Each microscopic silicon doodle was the handiwork of engineers at Qualcomm ...

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley By Leslie Berlin Oxford University, 402 pp. $30 During those giddy 1990s, everyplace claimed to be the next silicon ...