Dan Hoefler, 63, Silicon Valley Publicist, Dies

Don Hoefler, credited with popularizing the term “Silicon Valley” to describe the electronics industry’s concentration in the Santa Clara Valley, is dead at age 63.

Hoefler, who published a weekly newspaper called Micro-electronics News for the last 14 years, suffered a stroke last month and slipped into a coma. He died Tuesday in a South San Francisco hospital.

He was a publicist for Fairchild Semiconductor when the electronics industry was in its infancy, and first used the term “Silicon Valley” in 1970 when he wrote a series of articles for a weekly trade publication. He told the Associated Press in 1984 that he had first heard the phrase about the revolutionary semiconductors made from silicon, the second most-abundant chemical element after oxygen on the Earth, while on the East Coast.