Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon E. Moore, whose innovations in semiconductor chip design and manufacture helped found Silicon Valley and made the computer the ubiquitous, defining tool of modern life, died March 24 in his home in Hawaii. He was 94.
Intel announced the death but gave no further details.
dr Moore, a central figure in the history of electronics, famously predicted in 1965 that computing power would double every year for a decade, a prediction he changed to every two years in the mid-1970s. His prophecy that computing power would grow exponentially—and at a decreasing cost—was dubbed Moore’s Law, and it became the standard that scientists successfully tried to meet for decades.
Making computers smaller, faster, and cheaper meant integrating more and more circuitry on silicon chips. dr Moore envisioned that these integrated circuits “would lead to such marvels as home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer—automatic controls for automobiles and personal portable communications devices,” as he put it in the 1965 journal article, in which he formulated it made his signature prediction.
Moore’s Law became the driving force in computer technology for the next half century. “That’s what Silicon Valley was,” Carver Mead, the retired computer scientist from the California Institute of Technology who coined the term “Moore’s Law,” told the Associated Press on the law’s 40th anniversary.
“Innovation in electronics is as much about vision as it is about tinkering, and Gordon Moore has seen the future better than anyone in the last 50 years,” said Michael S. Malone, author of “The Intel Trinity,” a story from the year 2014 of the company. “The industry has not measured its performance using Moore’s Law. It designed and aligned its goals based on that, turning the law into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Intel led the rapid advance. In 1971, it introduced the first integrated circuit so powerful it could be called a “programmable general-purpose processor” — or microprocessor — the brain of a computer on a single chip. It had 2,300 transistors on a 12 square millimeter piece of silicon, or a fraction the size of a thumbnail.
“We are really the revolutionaries of the world today – not the kids with the long hair and beards who destroyed the schools a few years ago,” said Dr. Moore to a reporter at the time. (Today, Intel, still an industry leader, can fit about 1.2 billion transistors in the same area.)
dr Moore knew that any increase in computing power achieved by packing more transistors into smaller chips would ultimately violate the laws of physics, since an atom’s size limits its ability to shrink the silicon paths along which electrons travel . However, he cautioned against predicting “the end of progress” as scientists would come up with ever more sophisticated solutions.
“Every time someone declares Moore’s Law dead,” Malone said, “there’s a breakthrough.”
dr Moore founded Intel in 1968 with physicist Robert Noyce. Along with Noyce and six other founders, he also co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which was founded in 1957. Of Fairchild’s many inventions, two stand out as having revolutionized computing, and Dr. Moore was instrumental in each.
The first was a chemical printing process to make computer chips in batches rather than individually. The other, Noyce’s idea, was to place on a piece of silicon not just one transistor – the on-off switch of computers – but many, along with the wires to connect them. This was the integrated circuit that developed into the microprocessor at Intel. (A Texas Instruments scientist, Jack Kilby, simultaneously and independently invented the integrated circuit.)
Integrated circuits and the means to mass produce them sparked the scientific and entrepreneurial race paced by Moore’s Law.
Fairchild, headquartered southeast of San Francisco, gave no stock options to its employees, and many scientists left to start new companies. Companies named “fair children” included Advanced Micro Devices, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and Intel.
The exodus from Fairchild transformed the surrounding countryside’s orchards into Silicon Valley, a mecca for high-tech startups. An exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View shows a “pedigree” of dozens of Valley companies with Fairchild roots.
“It seemed like we had multiple spin-offs every time we had a new product idea,” said Dr. Moore in an interview conducted for the Chemical Heritage Foundation in 2015. “Most of the businesses around here can still trace their Fairchild lineage today. It was really the place that really moved the engineering entrepreneur.”
At Intel, Dr. Moore focuses on getting products from the drawing board to the customer quickly. He fostered an entrepreneurial mindset and streamlined operations, practices that became essential characteristics of Silicon Valley.
“When we founded Intel,” said Dr. Moore told PBS talk show host Charlie Rose, “Specifically, we haven’t set up a separate lab. We told the developers to do their work right at the production facility. … So we eliminated one step.”
Arthur Rock, who raised Intel’s initial funding and became its first chairman, described Dr. Moore told Fortune magazine in 1997 as a brilliant scientist who “more than anyone has set his sights on a goal and made everyone go there.” In contrast, Noyce, Intel’s first CEO, “had brilliant ideas, but he couldn’t stick to anything,” Rock said.
dr Moore succeeded Noyce as chief executive in 1975. Critical days were ahead for the company when Dr. Moore and his own stubborn successor, Andrew S. Grove, refocused the company on making microchips for storing information (memory chips). rather than chips that process information (logic chips). It turned out to be a multi-billion dollar success story for Intel.
A friend’s chemistry set
Gordon Earle Moore was born on January 3, 1929 in San Francisco. He grew up in Pescadero, California, a farming community in San Mateo County. His father was an assistant county sheriff, and his mother helped run her family’s general store.
He was 10 when his family moved to Redwood City, not far from Menlo Park and Palo Alto. A neighborhood friend got a chemistry set for Christmas and invited young Gordon to blow things up.
“Most people who knew me at the time would have described me as quiet,” he once quipped, “except for the bombs.”
dr Moore, the first in his family to go to college, received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. Four years later he received his PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and began working at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland.
In 1956, physicist William Shockley recruited Dr. Moore for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory near Stanford University. That year, Shockley and two other scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics for work they had done at Bell Laboratories, including the invention of the transistor. Transistors are a smaller, more reliable way to regulate electrical currents and would replace bulky, easily broken vacuum tubes in computers and other devices.
Within a year, Shockley’s overbearing leadership style – and his tendency to claim other people’s work as his own – caused Dr. Moore and seven other scientists to flee.
The “Treacherous Eight,” as Shockley called them, wanted to be hired as a group to study and manufacture semiconductors. They were rejected by more than two dozen companies. Eventually, Sherman Fairchild, an inventor whose father was a founder of IBM, invested $1.5 million to start Fairchild Semiconductor with the renegade engineers.
Fairchild’s achievements were so numerous that as the company grew out of its initial facility, Dr. Moore in an essay, the coffee room ceiling tiles “were covered with the marks of all those champagne corks.”
After a management reshuffle at Fairchild, Dr. Moore partners with Noyce to found Intel. He resigned as CEO in 1987 and was appointed CEO Emeritus a decade later. In 2006 he gave up this position.
dr Moore was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a former CEO of Caltech. His honors included the National Medal of Technology, awarded in 1990. A decade later, he and his wife, the former Betty Whitaker, created a foundation with more than $6 billion in endowments to support grants for conservation, scientific research, and education.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1950, survivors include two sons, Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.
Because of his reputation in Silicon Valley, Dr. Moore often asked to make predictions about the future of science and technology. He liked to say he wasn’t particularly suited for the role, having once dismissed the concept of the personal computer as “something of a joke”.
“The importance of the internet surprised me,” he told the New York Times in 2015. “It looked like it would be just another small communication network that solves certain problems. Little did I know it would open up a whole universe of new possibilities, and it certainly has. I wish I had predicted that.”