Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area coined by journalist Don C. Hoefler[?] in 1971. It encompasses the Santa Clara Valley[?] and southern half of the San Francisco Peninsula. It reaches approximately from Menlo Park, California down to San Jose, centered roughly on Sunnyvale. It was named "Silicon" for the high concentration of semiconductor and computer related industry in the area, and "Valley" for the Santa Clara Valley. The term may also be applied to surrounding areas on both sides of the bay into which many of these industries have expanded.

For many years in the 1970s and 1980s it was also incorrectly called "Silicone Valley", mostly by journalists, before the name became commonplace in American culture.

Thousands of technology companies are located in Silicon Valley. Notable ones include (in alphabetic order):

• 3Com
• Adobe Systems
• Advanced Micro Devices
• Apple Computer
• Applied Materials[?]
• Cisco Systems
• Hewlett-Packard
• Intel
• Oracle Corporation
• Sun Microsystems
• Symantec[?]

Cities include (in alphabetic order):

• Alviso[?]
• Atherton
• Cupertino
• Fremont
• Los Altos
• Los Gatos
• Menlo Park
• Mountain View
• Milpitas
• Newark
• Palo Alto
• San Jose
• Santa Clara
• Saratoga
• Sunnyvale
• Union City

Hoping to emulate the economic success of Silicon Valley, many cities, regions, and nations around the world have attempted to develop their own dense high tech areas, usually with informal names incorporating the words "Silicon" or "Valley". In some cases the names are developed by governments for marketing purposes, while others are coined by journalists. In a few cases, such as "Silicon Prairie[?]", there are multiple claimants to the name entangled in legal disputes.

• Silicon Alley[?] - New York, New York, Broadway from the Flatiron District to TriBeCa[?], and parts of Brooklyn.[?]
• Silicon Forest[?] - Portland, Oregon
• Brazilian Silicon Valley[?] - Campinas, Brazil
• Silicon Sentier[?] - France
• Silicon Glen[?] - Scotland
• Multimedia Super Corridor - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Wireless Valley - Stockholm, Sweden (note that this term is a trademark of Wireless Valley Communications and may thus become the source of an additional legal dispute)

External links

• Comprehensive list of "Silicon" names (http://www.tbtf.com/siliconia)
• References about Don C. Hoefler and 'Silicon valley' (http://www.netvalley.com/donhoefler)