Semiconductor Companies in California
The "Silicon Valley"

California's Santa Clara County, or Santa Clara Valley, has been known as Silicon Valley since the 1970's due to the large number of Silicon chip manufacturers who made the area their home.
The first developer to start working on semiconductor devices in Silicon Valley was the Shockley Semiconductor laboratory located in Mountain View, founded by William Shockley in 1956 as a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc. In 1957, eight scientists from the Shockley lab would resign and form there own company, Fairchild Semiconductor located in San Jose.
The list of semiconductor design and manufacturing companies in Silicon Valley include such names as IBM, Intel, HP, Hynix, Atmel, Cisco, Analog Devices, Fujitsu, Fairchild, Amkor, Broadcom, Infineon, National Semiconductor, Nvidia, LSI Logic, Tower Semiconductor, Marvel Semiconductor, Lion Semiconductor, MSIS Semiconductor, Oki Electric, ON Semiconductor (ONSEMI), AMD, and many others.
In the Southern California area (Los Angeles and San Diego) there are some semiconductor manufacturers including All American Semiconductor, Dialog, Cypress Semi, Fast Semiconductor, Indie Semiconductor, ElevATE Semiconductor, and NXP.