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

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Overview

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.

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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 Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies. Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation. It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the microcomputer, among other technologies, were developed. As of 2013, the region employed about a quarter of a million information technology workers.

As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the term "Silicon Valley" has come to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County and southeastern San Mateo County, and a definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire Bay Area. The term Silicon Valley is often used for the American high-technology economic sector. The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similar named locations, as well as research parks and technology centers with a comparable structure all around the world.

Due to the personal connection between people and computer technology, many headquarters of companies in Silicon Valley are a hotspot for tourism.

Origin of the term

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.

Companies based in Silicon Valley

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:
Adobe Inc.
Advanced Micro Devices
Agilent Technologies
Alphabet Inc.
Apple Inc.
Applied Materials
Cadence Design Systems
Cisco Systems
Cypress Semiconductor
eBay
Electronic Arts
Facebook, Inc.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HP Inc.
Intel
Intuit
Intuitive Surgical
Juniper Networks
KLA Corporation
Lam Research
Lockheed Martin Space
Maxim Integrated
NetApp
Netflix
Nvidia
Oracle Corporation
PayPal
Salesforce
Sanmina Corporation
Square, Inc.
Synnex
Synopsys
Tesla, Inc.
Twitter
Western Digital
Xilinx

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Silicon Valley", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0