After Mexican painter Diego Rivera’s Google Doodle last Thursday, the Google home page today pays tribute to microchip co-creator and Silicon Valley icon Robert Noyce on his 84th birth anniversary with a doodle.
To celebrate what would have been the 84th birthday of Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, the Google Doodle design shows a stylised electronic chip with the Google branding on its home page.
Noyce was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. Grew up in Grinnell, Iowa and attended the local schools, he exhibited a talent for mathematics and science while in high school and took the Grinnell College freshman physics course in his senior year. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945.
Noyce, nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley" co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited along with Jack Kilby with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip, which fuelled the personal computer revolution.
He died in 1990 in Austin, Texas, at the age of 60. His family set up the Noyce Foundation that works to better the teaching of maths, science and literacy in US schools.
