IEEE/CPMT Luncheon Meeting, in the Santa Clara Valley:
"The Origins of Silicon Valley: Why and How It Happened Here"
-- Paul Wesling, IEEE SF Bay Area Communications Director, and SCV CPMT Chapter Advisor
Presentation Slides: "The Origins of Silicon Valley: Why and How It Happened Here" Paul Wesling, IEEE SFBA Council (3.5 MB PDF)
WebEx Talk: cisco.webex.com/ciscosales/ldr.php?RCID=5e2bfdd286ade0695d7dbce0e71fad93 (53 minutes)
Newer Version, for Stanford Historical Society: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDB_W6POys (1 hour)
To view on your Smart TV, Roku, XBox, etc: select YouTube App; search on "stanford silicon valley"; it should be in the first 6 choices.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Registration at 11:30 AM; Buffet lunch served from 11:45 - 12:15
($15 if reserved by September 25; $5 for fulltime students and currently unemployed; $5 more at door;
vegetarian available); presentation (no cost) at 12:15.
- OVERVIEW:
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Why did Silicon Valley come into being? The story goes back to local Hams (amateur radio operators) trying to break RCA's tube patents, the sinking of the Titanic, Naval ship communications requirements, Fred Terman and Stanford University, local invention of high-power tubes (gammatron, klystron), WW II and radar, William Shockley's mother living in Palo Alto, Hetch Hetchy water, and the SF Bay Area infrastructure that developed -- these factors pretty much determined that the semiconductor and IC industries would be located in the Santa Clara Valley. And since semiconductor device development and production were centered here, it made sense that Charles (Bud) Eldon of H-P would be asked by his management to start an IRE Group on Product Engineering in Palo Alto, to serve our local engineers (which grew into today's CPMT Society).
Paul Wesling, a CPMT Society Distinguished Lecturer, will give an exciting and colorful history of device technology development and innovation that began in San Francisco, moved down the Peninsula (seeking lower costs and better housing), and ended up in the Santa Clara Valley during and following World War II. You'll meet some of the colorful characters -- Lee DeForest, Bill Eitel, Charles Litton, Fred Terman, David Packard, Bill Hewlett and others -- who came to define the worldwide electronics industries through their inventions and process development.
- Speaker Biography:
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Paul Wesling has worked at GTE, Amdahl, Tandem Computers, H-P and several start-ups, in R&D, design, and manufacturing technology. Assignments included bubble memory development, IC packaging, multi-chip modules, thermal management, reliability, and executive management, as well as developing advanced technology and professional skills courses for the technical staff. A Fellow of the IEEE, he received the IEEE Centennial Medal, the CPMT Distinguished Service award, and the IEEE's Third Millennium Medal, and served as the CPMT Society's vice president of publications for 22 years. Now retired, he is communications director for the IEEE's SF Bay Area Council and the editor of the Council's GRID Magazine.
Paul, a CPMT Society Distinguished Lecturer, has served the local Santa Clara Valley CPMT chapter since 1972, as an officer and more recently as Chapter Advisor. His enthusiastic and inventive approach to volunteer organizational development was honed in the Boy Scouts, both as a youth (he's an Eagle Scout) and as a Scoutmaster of a troop of 60 to 100 Scouts for 15 years. Through his initiative and oversight, the SCV CPMT Chapter has put on over 450 multi-evening and full-day classes locally, making the chapter financially independent and setting its reputation as a high-service-delivery unit of the IEEE. The chapter earned the Society's Best Chapter award twice during his service, and has organized a number of the Society's conferences, including IEMT and SEMI-THERM.
He earned his BS-EE and his MS-Materials Science, both from Stanford University. He holds the Extra Class Ham radio callsign KM6LH. From his career in Silicon Valley, he has had a clear view of the developments here over the past 4 decades.
If you are not on our Chapter's regular email distribution list
for meeting anouncements, you can easily be added!
Place yourself on our email distribution list or send a request to
Paul Wesling.]
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