Robert Noyce biography looks at the man behind a Silicon Valley myth

``The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley'' by Leslie Berlin; Oxford ($30)

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Memories tend to become legends over time, obscuring rather than illuminating the subject being recalled. Bob Noyce was one of the giants of Silicon Valley. In 1959, he co-created the integrated circuit that led to the creation of the $214 billion chip industry. He co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, which became models for starting companies with rich connections to the valley's networks of venture capitalists and engineers.

He was a brilliant technologist and a fair-minded top executive who helped establish many of the valley's best traditions, from employee stock options to angel investing. He was a humble multimillionaire, a dashing industry spokesman and a Midwestern preacher's boy made good. But because Noyce died of a heart attack at age 62 in 1990, a whole generation has grown up without a chance to know, understand or even remember him.

Leslie Berlin, a visiting scholar at Stanford, has brought Noyce and his role in the valley's history into focus with her biography, "The Man Behind the Microchip." The most extraordinary thing about this book is that Berlin has been able to cut through the legend and establish that this man, once nicknamed "the mayor of Silicon Valley," was also an ordinary human being.

Noyce wasn't a towering figure at 5 feet 8 inches. He got an early girlfriend pregnant. He couldn't quit chain-smoking. He had a years-long affair that helped break up his marriage and caused his children great pain. He would sit in his car after work, idling his engine, trying to think of a place he could go other than his home. He was not such a good manager, and while he could barely bring himself to fire or lay off anyone, he backed an effort to fight unionization at Intel.

Berlin conducted 120 interviews and worked on the book for 10 years, counting five spent doing a dissertation on Noyce. When Berlin sent a copy to Noyce's widow, she said she would support turning it into a biography. Berlin gained access to Noyce's papers, his colleagues and his family. Her book is written in a respectful and admiring tone, making it a contrast to the tell-all "Inside Intel" book by Tim Jackson.

But Berlin had access beyond the official story. She interviewed Noyce's mistress and plenty of his critics to uncover Noyce's unseen human side. He was usually in step with co-founder Gordon Moore, but he had a more distant, mixed relationship with Andrew Grove, who later took over Intel. Berlin notes that even in securing his most important patent on the microchip, Noyce left behind colleagues who resented how he always got the credit.

"These elements of Noyce's character make him more of a man, not less," Berlin writes in her introduction. In an interview, she added, "I don't think it does anyone a service to make the people we admire seem perfect. The purpose was to illuminate Noyce's character. He took risks in everything he did."

Berlin says her sources, such as Noyce's family and Intel, put no restrictions on what she could publish. Intel has taken some of her archives and put them on display at its museum at its headquarters in Santa Clara.

What emerges is a three-dimensional view of Noyce from a variety of angles. As I read, I turned down the corners of the pages on memorable anecdotes about Noyce. By the end of the book, I had more than 30 such dog-eared pages. Among Berlin's finds that might otherwise have been lost to history: Noyce had done some work that might have led him to share in a Nobel Prize for the creation of the tunnel diode. And she found dollar bills that each Fairchild founder had signed upon forming the company.

Even though the book points out his flaws, Noyce emerges as a charismatic figure whose creativity inspired an entire industry. As the subtitle suggests, Berlin spends a lot of time putting Noyce into context and noting how his contributions were enhanced by others.

"He was so charismatic, it was easy to attribute everything to Noyce," Berlin said. "I tried to talk about him as an excellent leader and how he needed people around him to sift through his ideas and make them really work."

After hitting some tough personal problems in the 1970s, Noyce pulled off a turnaround. He married Ann Bowers, the former personnel manager of Intel - his second wife. He collected awards such as the National Medal of Honor, and he used his stature to create Sematech, the chip industry consortium credited with saving the U.S. chip industry's leadership against the Japanese and other determined overseas challengers.

But in many ways, he has been forgotten. As did Noyce's own life, Berlin's book ends abruptly. It has a couple of pages of conclusions, not nearly enough to judge the impact of Noyce's life. Berlin doesn't permit herself any speculations about how things might have turned out if Noyce had lived longer.

Noyce left day-to-day management in the hands of Moore and Grove in 1979. If he had stayed longer, would Intel's mantra have become "only the paranoid survive" as it did under the leadership of Grove? Or might it have stayed closer to Noyce's edict, "Go off and do something wonderful"? Intel needed both styles of leaders, Berlin says.

Asked what Noyce would think today, Berlin said, "He'd be thrilled to see how the integrated circuit is such an important part of people's daily lives, that the U.S. semiconductor industry is still alive, how big Intel has become. He would be thrilled the spirit of innovation is still alive. He'd be very concerned about the state of science and engineering here."

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(c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.