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 integrated circuit computer chip in 1959. With his colleague Gordon Moore, he founded {{link=Intel Corp.">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.