Colloquium Archive

Why did the San Francisco Peninsula spawn the technology-centric marvel commonly known as Silicon Valley?  The early history of amateur radio on the Peninsula; the development of microwave tube expertise focused around Stanford University; World War II and the importance of radar; Frederick Terman and the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard; Terman’s Master Plan for Stanford University upon his return; the advent of the Cold War with the Sputnik shock and the Space Race; Shockley Semiconductor’s spinoff leading to the growth of the semiconductor industry around the planar process – all of these played into the emergence of Silicon Valley.  But there were other factors that were essential in the making of Silicon Valley. These factors will be blended together with the historical ingredients that allow us to answer the question: “Silicon Valley – Why the San Francisco Peninsula?”

Don Estreich is currently Adjunct Professor of Engineering Science at Sonoma State University specializing in RF and microwave communication.  He received the B.S.E.E. degree from U.C. Berkeley and the Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980.  During the 1970s he worked in Silicon Valley at Teledyne Semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto. He worked for 30 years at Hewlett-Packard’s Technology Center (later Agilent Technologies) at their Santa Rosa site on compound semiconductor integrated circuits and microwave, optical test and measurement instrumentation before retiring in 2009.