Guided tours and stories about Silicon Valley at Science Week 2023

_{Main image: Eva Deltor, Nuria Torres and Marta Duch before starting the workshop at Lleialtat Santsenca.}

Open Doors of the IMB-CNM

This year the usual guided tours for the Science Week were held in three unique shifts that sold out in the days prior to their realization. Cecilia Jiménez, Joan Bausells and Llibertat Abad were in charge of welcoming and guiding the general public who came to the facilities to show them the Zenon Navarro Museum Space and the perimeter of the Micro and Nanofabrication Clean Room.

Viatja al fascinant món del transistor!

The microelectronics workshop for children was scheduled twice during Science Week:

• On Monday, November 13, it was held at Lleialtat Santsenca in Barcelona for two groups of 4th ESO of the Institut Escola Arts of the same neighborhood of Sants. Nuria Torres, Marta Duch and Eva Deltor were in charge of coordinating it.
• On Sunday, November 19, the workshop was held at the Museu Nacional de la Ciència i la Tècnica de Catalunya (MNACTEC) in Terrassa, where an open session of one hour and a half was held. With the collaboration of David Sánchez, Llibertat Abad, Carles Cané and Joan Marc Rafí.

Exhibition La revolució silenciosa in Barcelona

The exhibition La revolució silenciosa, which proposes a journey through the history of microelectronics on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the transistor, has been on view throughout the month of November at the Lleialtat Santsenca (C/ d'Olzinelles 31, 08014) in Barcelona; promoted by the Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM, CSIC) with the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology - Ministry of Science and Innovation (FECYT).

The exhibition is a journey that begins in 1947 and the development of the first contact tip transistor at Bell Labs in the United States. Today's digital and hyperconnected society cannot be understood without this small invention: the transistor is at the heart of all electronic devices, has allowed the miniaturization of devices and the creation of digital circuits.

Experiences Working in California’s Silicon Valley of the 1980s

An invited talk was held virtually in English with Alexander A. Grillo, a retired researcher from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California Santa Cruz (USA), who talked about his experience working in different Silicon Valley companies in the 1980s. Grillo was invited by researcher Miguel Ullán, from the Radiation Detectors Group.

The southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area has been the birthplace for many electronic innovations throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. The first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming started in San Jose in 1909; William Shockley set up his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View in 1956; both cities are in the Santa Clara County of California. Roughly 1970 is typically considered the beginning of what became known as Silicon Valley because of the number of electronics companies supporting each other and competing against each other within the geographical area called Santa Clara Valley and the governmental boundary area of Santa Clara County. The funding for this innovation and growth came largely from venture capital groups, many of which had offices in the same valley. By 1980, much of the necessary structure and protocols for doing business had been established, some of those companies still exist today, some do not. The industry still had much growing to do, new tools to be perfected and advances beyond believed physical limits to be achieved, in order to create what we understand the industry to be today. A review of his experiences working in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, experiences in two so-called “startup” companies and in one of the standard bearers, Intel Corporation.

The talk completes the lecture series on the 75-year history of the transistor and the ramifications that small discovery had on society and the burgeoning semiconductor industry. You can watch it again in its entirety here: