Gordon Moore, one of the founders of US chip maker Intel and a key figure in the history of Silicon Valley, has died aged 94.
Moore’s early vision that the cost of electronics would come down, turning digital technology into a part of everyday life, made his name a byword for the rapid and inevitable progress of the semiconductor sector, and the wider technology industry.
As one of the three executives who formed and led the chipmaker for the first three decades, he was a key figure in the company that is often called “putting silicon into Silicon Valley”, and helped create an entrepreneurial management style that did much to shape the culture of the modern US technology industry.
In 1965, six years after the invention of the transistor, Moore predicted in a magazine article that the number of transistors and other components on a chip would double every year for the next decade. This prediction, called Moore’s Law by Intel colleagues, has been an example of technological progress ever since.
“I wanted to predict that this would be a way to make electronics cheaply, which was not recognized at the time,” he said later. His prediction suggested that the number of transistors on a chip would jump from 60 to 60,000 in the next 10 years – “a pretty wild extrapolation” but one that turned out to be “very accurate”, he said.
He and others at Intel describe Moore’s Law as a powerful motivating force, as do observations about the exponential progress that has come from the miniaturization of electronics.
It is credited with helping the company’s engineers maintain the manufacturing process improvements that made Intel the global leader in chipmaking for decades, until recently losing out to TSMC and Samsung.
Born in San Francisco in 1929, Moore earned a PhD in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology before moving to the East Coast for a position at Johns Hopkins University. Within two years, he was back in California after being hired by William Shockley, one of the three men later awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor.
Shockley’s overbearing management style soon alienated the brilliant group of young engineers he had assembled. In 1957, Moore was part of a group that left to form a new business, Fairchild Semiconductor, as a division of a larger company.
Known as the Traitorous Eight, his defection made him an example of a new generation of young company founders with the ambition and drive to found an industry focused on electronics. Moore and Robert Noyce, the other co-founder, grew tired of being forced to follow instructions from headquarters and in 1968 quit to create their own company, Intel.
The unassuming Moore had a less powerful figure than other executives who shaped the chip maker’s first decade.
The charismatic co-founder, Noyce, became chief executive when Intel made its mark as a memory chip producer. Andy Grove, an early employee who later ran the company, was known for his hard-driving style that proved an asset when Intel was forced to leave the memory chip market in the face of competition from Japan and reposition itself as a manufacturer. from the computer processor.
Moore himself adopted a more subdued style, although he played a key role in Intel’s management for many years, first as executive vice president and president before becoming CEO from 1979 to 1987. 2006.
Moore spent his last years – along with a good portion of his Intel fortune – in philanthropy, having founded the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with his wife. The organization has donated $5.1 billion since it was founded in 2000 and has given back thanks to scientific discoveries, environmental conservation, advances in treatment and the preservation of patients in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Moore revised his famous prediction in 1975 to predict a doubling of the number of transistors only every two years. The increasingly difficult challenge of producing chips with smaller feature sizes has also led to predictions of the “death of Moore’s law”.
Moore himself said he thinks that point will be reached before miniaturization reaches its current stage, with features on today’s most advanced chips just a few atoms small.
But even as Intel and the rest of the industry faced daunting challenges, the compounding advances of the chip industry’s first half-century had a profound impact. One of the latest chips from Intel has more than 100 billion transistors, about 43 million of which are the company’s first processor, which was developed in 1971.
Moore is survived by his wife, Betty, sons Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.