Robert Norton Noyce nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley," co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited with the realization of the first integrated circuit or microchip which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name. Robert Norton Noyce was born December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. Noyce majored in physics at Grinnell College (B.A., 1949) and earned a doctorate in solid state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Ph.D., 1953), for a dissertation related to the technology he found most fascinating, the transistor. He joined William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor and eventual Nobel Prize winner, at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments. He received the National Medal Of Science in 1979.