Biography | Robert Noyce — The Consortium He Agreed to Run Because the Search Committee Could Not

Noyce's last job was not Intel. It was a rented former Data General site on Montopolis Drive. SEMATECH — Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology — was incorporated in 1987 as a consortium of U.S. chip firms and the federal government. The aim was to recover manufacturing ground lost to Japan. Austin won the site fight on 7 January 1988. The University of Texas System bought ninety-four acres and leased them to the consortium for a dollar a year. The group moved in on 15 April 1988. The $75 million clean room was dedicated on 15 November 1988. Noyce had chaired the search for a chief executive. When the committee could not name one, colleagues pressed him to take the post himself. Gordon Moore's memorial tribute records the reason Noyce gave: the job was too important to leave to others. He moved to Austin in 1988. On 30 March 1989 the consortium announced its first processed wafers, started the day the clean room opened, and finished three days ahead of schedule. He died on 3 June 1990, at 62. He had a heart attack at his Austin house after a morning swim and was pronounced dead at Seton Medical Center, 1201 West 38th Street. The house is not pinned. He was still SEMATECH's chief executive. He had been scheduled that day to collect a new aircraft that could fly nonstop from Austin to Washington or to the Valley. The Montopolis campus later passed through SVTC and Novati. SEMATECH itself shifted most operations to Albany. The original research fab is not a museum. The pin is the public industrial site where he spent the last two years. What closed here was a career that ran from a Grinnell classroom to two companies and a consortium, and from a notebook page in Palo Alto to a clean room in Texas. Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Noyce in 1959; no rights-clear photograph of the 1988 Austin dedication was located for this pass.