The Valley

Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, Moffett Federal Airfield to the northwest, Mountain View to the west, Los Altos to the southwest, Cupertino to the south, and Santa Clara to the east. It lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101.

Sunnyvale has several neighborhoods, and while they are not "official" enough to be named on a map, they are the principal designations that are used by the many neighborhood associations recognized by the city. The southern half of Sunnyvale is predominantly residential, while most of the portion of Sunnyvale north of Highway 237 is zoned for industrial use. The far eastern section of El Camino Real in Sunnyvale has a significant concentration of businesses owned by South Indian immigrants. The area of the city bounded by Fremont Avenue and Cupertino to the south, and Los Altos to the west, is considered to be more desirable to reside as measured by home values.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Applied Micro, Applied Signal Technology, Ariba, Aruba Networks, Blue Coat Systems, Dionex, Finisar, Fortinet, Infinera, Intuitive Surgical, Juniper Networks, Maxim Integrated Products, MIPS Technologies, NetApp, ShoreTel, Silicon Image, Spansion, Trimble Navigation, Yahoo!, and Zoran are among the companies based in Sunnyvale.

Sunnyvale is home to several aerospace/defense companies; Lockheed Martin has a major facility in Sunnyvale, and Honeywell, Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems - Marine Systems (formerly Joshua Hendy Iron Works), and Spirent also have offices in Sunnyvale.

Sunnyvale has consistently ranked as one of the safest ten cities (for cities of similar size) in the United States according to the FBI's crime reports. From 1966 to at least 2004, Sunnyvale never placed below fifth in safety rankings among U.S. cities in its population class. In 2005, Sunnyvale ranked as the 18th-safest city overall in the U.S., according to the Morgan Quitno Awards. In 2009, Sunnyvale was ranked 7th in U.S. by Forbes Magazine in an analysis of America's safest cities.