Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corp., helped give Silicon Valley its name, the California semiconductor chipmaker that helped achieve industrial dominance once held by giant U.S. railroad or steel companies. Friday at his home in Hawaii. He is 94 years old.
His death Intel confirmed and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. They did not give a reason.
Along with a handful of colleagues, Mr. Moore would be proud.
Aspiring to be a teacher, but unable to find a job in education, Mr. Moore became a billionaire as a result of an initial $500 investment in the burgeoning microchip business, which revolutionized electronics. The world’s largest industries.
His colleagues said that he saw the future. In 1965, he predicted that in what became known as Moore’s Law, the number of transistors placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals in the future, causing the data processing power of computers to increase exponentially.
He later added two correlations: Emerging technology would make computers more expensive to build, although consumers would be charged less and less for them as more were sold. Moore’s Law lasted for decades.
Mr. Through a combination of Moore’s intelligence, leadership, charisma and connections, and that of his partner and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, the two assembled a team. Age of high technology.
This is the group that advocated the use of micro-thin chips of highly polished, chemically sanded silicon, one of the most common natural resources on Earth, because of silicon’s amazing hospitality in smaller and smaller homes. A small electronic circuit that can work at higher and higher speeds.
With silicon microprocessors the brains of the computer, Intel in the mid-1980s helped American manufacturers regain the lead over their formidable Japanese rivals in the broader field of computer data processing. In the 90s, Intel put its microprocessors in 80 percent of computers manufactured worldwide, becoming the most successful semiconductor company in history.
Most of his Mr. Happened under Moore’s watch. He was chief executive from 1975 to 1987, and Andrew Crowe succeeded him as chairman until 1997.
To increase his wealth, Mr. Moore also became a prominent figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife donated 175 million Intel shares to create the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In 2001, they donated $600 million to the California Institute of Technology, the largest gift to an institution of higher education at the time. The foundation’s assets now exceed $8 billion, and it has awarded more than $5 billion since its founding.
In interviews, Mr. Moore was characteristically humble about his achievements, particularly the technological advances made possible by Moore’s Law.
“What I saw was that semiconductor devices were going to make electronics cheaper. That was the message I was trying to get across,” he told journalist Michael Malone in 2000. “It’s an amazingly accurate prediction — much more accurate than I thought it would be.”
As the industry shifts from discrete transistors and tubes to silicon microchips, Mr. Not only did Moore predict, but his prediction was so reliable over the years that technology companies based their product strategy on the assumption. There will be Moore’s Law.
“Any business doing rational multiyear planning needs to take this rate of change, or else get steamrolled,” said longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Harry Sall.
“That’s his legacy,” said Arthur Rock, Intel’s early investor and Mr. Moore’s friend said. “It’s not Intel. It’s not the Moore Foundation. It’s that phrase: Moore’s Law.
Gordon Earl Moore was born on January 3, 1929 in San Francisco. He grew up in Pescadero, a small beach town south of San Francisco, where his father, Walter H. Moore was a deputy sheriff and the family of his mother, the former Florence Almira Williamson, ran a general store.
Mr. Moore attended San Jose State College (now San Jose State University), where he met Betty Whittaker, a journalism student. They got married in 1950. That year, he earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1954, he also received a doctorate in chemistry from Caltech.
One of the first jobs he applied for was as a manager at Dow Chemical. In 1994 Mr. Moore wrote. “They sent me to a psychologist to see how this would fit in. “The psychologist said I was technically fine, but I wouldn’t manage anything.”
So Mr. Moore accepted a position at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Later, seeking a way back to California, he interviewed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. He was offered the job, “but I didn’t want to take the spectra of exploding atomic bombs, so I turned it down,” he wrote.
On the contrary, in 1956, Mr. Moore worked with William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, in the West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, which aimed to develop a cheap silicon transistor.
But Mr. Shockley Semiconductor Company, who has no experience in running a company. Established under Shockley. In 1957, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce joined a group known as the “Traitorous Eight”. With $1.3 million in backing from aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild and $500 each, the eight left to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, a pioneer in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce decided to form his own company in 1968, focusing on semiconductor memory. Mr. They wrote what Moore described as a “very generic” business plan.
In a 1994 interview, he said, “We’re going to work with silicon and make interesting products.
Despite their vague proposal, they had no problem finding financial backing.
With a capital of $2.5 million, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyes called their start-up Integrated Electronics Corporation, later shortened to Intel. The third employee is Mr. Crowe, a young Hungarian immigrant, met Mr. Worked under Moore.
After some hesitation about which technology to focus on, the three settled on a new version of MOS called metal-oxide semiconductor—silicon-gate MOS. To improve the speed and density of the transistor, they used silicon instead of aluminum.
“Fortunately, we’ve hit on a technology that has the right level of difficulty for a successful startup,” said Mr. Moore wrote in 1994. “This is how Intel started.”
In the early 1970s, Intel’s 4000 series “computer on a chip” started the revolution in personal computers, although Intel missed out on the opportunity to produce a PC that Mr.
“Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel build a computer for the home,” he wrote. “And I asked him, ‘What would someone want to do with a computer in their home?’
However, he looked to the future. In 1963, while director of research and development at Fairchild, Mr. Moore provided a book chapter detailing what was to become a precursor to his eponymous law, without an apparent numerical prediction. Two years later, he published an article in Electronics, a widely distributed trade journal, entitled “Cramming More Components into Integrated Circuits.”
“The article makes the same argument as the book chapter, with the addition of this apparent numerical prediction,” said David Brock, author of “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary.”
There is little evidence that many people read the article when it was published, Mr. Brock said.
“He kept giving talks with these charts and plots, and people started using his slides and reproducing his diagrams,” Mr. Brock said. “Then people saw this phenomenon. Silicon microchips became more complex, and they became less expensive.”
In the 1960s, Mr. When Moore started in the electronics industry, a silicon transistor sold for $150. Then, $10 will buy more than 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars progressed as quickly as computers, “they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon, and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than to park it. (Cars are also half an inch longer.)
Mr. Moore’s survivors include his wife and his sons, Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.
In 2014, Forbes named Mr. Moore’s net worth is estimated at $7 billion. Yet he remained uninitiated throughout his life, preferring ragged shirts and khakis. He shopped at Costco and kept a collection of fly lures and fishing reels on his office desk.
Moore’s Law will reach its conclusion as engineers face some fundamental physical limits, and it will cost more to build factories to achieve the next level of miniaturization. In recent years, the pace of miniaturization has slowed.
On the inevitable conclusion of Moore’s Law, Mr. Moore commented from time to time. “It can’t go on forever,” he said in a 2005 interview with Techworld magazine. “The nature of extremes is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.”
Holcomb, former science editor of The Times B. Nobel died in 2017.