In 1952 I drove a delivery route from Oakland down through San Jose and back up the Peninsula to San Francisco. It was called the Blossom Valley. San Jose was just a small farm town. Once stopped for mass at a small church and the service was in Portuguese.
In 1959 I bought a house near Leigh and Blossom Hill road. The drive to the IBM labs was through farm land. At one spot the road went between a pair of ancient pepper trees. When they dropped their pods the whole area was pink. Years later they were cut down to make room for a parking lot. Now it’s called Pepper Tree Plaza.
I left the Valley in 1996. It was still hardware engineering with manual checking of mask layers. Sometime after 2000 silicon compilers and Taiwan foundries took over. Fairchild and National Semiconductor are long gone.
I wish! Something resembling this conversation happens way more often than I’d like:
S) Hey, I’ve got this bug X on generation 5 of our hardware…
H) That was like 6 years ago. We’ve made 3 new architectures since then and are working on the fourth. I don’t remember.
S) We’re still shipping gen 5! Fine. Ok, I guess this is a long shot, but what about bug Y on gen 5?
H) Oh, that one’s easy, since the unit hasn’t changed in years.
S) Why not? It’s not like it isn’t riddled with bugs.
H) Yes, but the guy that originally made it retired.
Yup. I moved to Sunnyvale in 1978 and the orchards were pretty well gone by then. Near my apartment, where two roads diverged there was a triangular bit of land with about twenty trees on it and that was it. There were two types of cannery, fruit and tomato. A lot of the fruit cocktail in this country was canned there because, except for the pineapple, everything grew in the county, and the pineapple was easily shipped in because there was a saltwater connection. Those closed up when the fruit was gone.
The tomato canneries kept going for a while with tub flatbeds of toms being trucked in from San Joaquin Valley but about 1985 those closed, too. I’d read about it in January but forgotten when tomato season started. All early summer I had the impression something was missing but couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I was driving south on I-5 and a tomato truck went barrelling by the other direction. “That’s it!”
Your timeline is about 10 years off. The last design I did where I manually checked mask layers was in 1987 (that was for connectivity; automated checking for design rules pre-dates my work experience). Logic synthesis started taking off in the early 90s (as an analog/mixed-signal designer I was only peripherally affected), and TSMC/UMC were also getting well established at that time - that was the “fabless revolution” that I mentioned in an earlier post. I know I did my first TSMC design in 1994, and a co-worker had been designing in that process for a year or two.
National Semiconductor existed independently until six years ago when it was acquired by TI. Fairchild was acquired last year by ON Semiconductor. AFAIK the majority of the Silicon Valley operations of those two companies are still in operation, just with different signs on the buildings.