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Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. It corresponds roughly to the geographical Santa Clara Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zurich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution. The word "silicon" in the name originally referred to the large number of innovators and manufacturers in the region specializing in silicon-based MOS transistors and integrated circuit chips. The area is now home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the...

The popularization of the name is credited to Don Hoefler. He first used it in the article "Silicon Valley USA", which appeared in the January 11, 1971 issue of the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News . However, it took about a decade before the term came into common use. The term gained widespread use in the early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market.

Silicon Valley was born through the intersection of several contributing factors including a skilled science research base housed in area universities, plentiful venture capital, and steady U.S. Department of Defense spending. Stanford University leadership was especially important in the valley's early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success. Military technology roots edit On August 23, 1899, the first ship-to-shore wireless telegraph message to be received in the US was from the San Francisco lightship outside the Golden Gate, signaling the return of the American fleet from the Philippines after their victory in the Spanish–American War in 1898. The ship had been outfitted with a wireless telegraph transmitter by a local newspaper, so that they could prepare a celebration on the return of the American sailors. Local historian Clyde Arbuckle states in Clyde Arbuckle's History of San Jose that "California first heard the click of a ...

Computer chips edit Following the 1959 inventions of the monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild, and the MOSFET (MOS transistor) by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs, Atalla first proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) chip in 1960, and then the first commercial MOS IC was introduced by General Microelectronics in 1964. The development of the MOS IC led to the invention of the microprocessor, incorporating the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed and realized by Federico Faggin along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. In April 1974, Intel released the Intel 8080, a "computer on a chip", "the first truly usable microprocessor". Homebrew Computer Club edit The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically minded hobby...

The San Francisco Bay Area has the largest concentration of high-tech companies in the United States, at 387,000 high-tech jobs, of which Silicon Valley accounts for 225,300 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary in the United States at $144,800. Largely a result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita. The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing centre in the United States. The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009 and has decreased to a record low of 2.7% as of August 2019. Silicon Valley received 41% of all U.S. venture investment in 2011, and 46% in 2012. More traditional industries also recognize the potential of high-tech development, an...

Depending on what geographic regions are included in the meaning of the term, the population of Silicon Valley is between 3.5 and 4 million. A 1999 study by AnnaLee Saxenian for the Public Policy Institute of California reported that a third of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers were immigrants and that nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley's high-technology firms since 1980 were run by Chinese (17 percent) or Indian descent CEOs (7 percent). There is a stratum of well-compensated technical employees and managers, including 10s of thousands of "single-digit millionaires". This income and range of assets will support a middle-class lifestyle in Silicon Valley. Diversity edit In November 2006, the University of California, Davis released a report analyzing business leadership by women within the state. The report showed that although 103 of the 400 largest public companies headquartered in California were located in Santa Clara County (the most of all counties), only 8.8%...