Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the in  that serves as a global center for  and. The area is home to many of the world's largest and influential technology companies, such as Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Nvidia, and Apple Inc.

Statistics
Silicon Valley corresponds roughly to the geographical. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after and ), according to the.

History of the term
The popularization of the name is credited to. He first used it in the article "Silicon Valley USA", which appeared in the January 11, 1971 issue of the weekly trade newspaper . However, it took about a decade before the term came into common use. The term gained widespread use in the early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market.

The word "silicon" in the name originally referred to the large number of innovators and manufacturers in the region specializing in -based s and chips. The area is now home to many of the world's largest, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the , and thousands of. Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the investment in the United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and  for high-tech innovation and scientific development. It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based, the microprocessor, and the , among other technologies, were developed. As of 2013, the region employed about a quarter of a million workers.

As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the term "Silicon Valley" has come to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to and southeastern, and a ical definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire. The term Silicon Valley is often used as a for the American high-technology. The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired, as well as and  with a comparable structure all around the world.

Due to the personal connection between people and computer technology, many headquarters of companies in Silicon Valley are a hotspot for.