Robert Noyce

Robert N. Noyce, an inventor of a computer chip that revolutionized the electronics industry and gave rise to the high-technology era, died in 1990 after suffering a heart attack, He was 62 years old. Dr. Noyce's name never became widely known to the public, his work helped make possible products including personal computers, pocket calculators, programmable coffeemakers and microwave ovens and computerized flight plans for commercial and military aircraft. Noyce also played a leading role in the commercialization of electronics as a founder of Semiconductor Industry Association in 1975 and as an industry spokesman who frequently lobbied in Washington. In 1968, Dr. Noyce and Gordon E Moore founded the Intel Corporation, which developed the microprocessor that is the heart of most personal computers, and helped start a number of other computer companies in Silicon Valley. Noyce remained a vice chairman of Intel. At the time of his death, Dr. Noyce was the president and chief executive of Sematech Inc., a research consortium in Austin Texas. Dr. Noyce became fascinated by computers while at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where he earned a bachelor's degree. In 1953, he received a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Later that year he took his first job as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia. He left in 1956 for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. A year later he had helped found the Fairchild Camera and Instruments Corporation's semiconductor division. While at Fairchild, Dr. Noyce invented a process for making integrated circuits. In 1969 he and Gordon E. Moore founded Intel. Dr. Noyce was survived by his wife, Ann Bowers, of Austin; his mother, Harriet, of Berkeley, Calif.; three brothers, Donald of Berkeley, Gaylord of New Haven and Ralph of San Jose, Calif.; four children, William B. of Hollis, N.H., Pendred of Weston, Mass., Priscilla of Kenya, and Margaret of Kyle, Tex., and 12 grandchildren.