Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel behind Moore’s Law, dies at age 94

Gordon E. Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corporation, the California semiconductor chip maker that gave Silicon Valley its name and achieved the kind of industrial dominance once held by the giant US railroad or steel companies of another time, passed away on Friday at his home in Hawaii. He turned 94.

His death was announced by Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. No cause was given.

Along with a handful of colleagues, Mr. Moore took credit for bringing laptops to hundreds of millions of people and embedding microprocessors into everything from bathroom scales, toasters and toy fire engines to cell phones, cars and fighter jets.

Mr. Moore had wanted to be a teacher, but couldn’t get a teaching job. He later referred to himself as an “accidental entrepreneur” because he became a billionaire as a result of an initial $500 investment in the fledgling microchip business that turned electronics into one of the world’s largest industries.

And it was he, his colleagues said, who saw the future. In 1965, in what became known as Moore’s Law, he predicted that the number of transistors that can be placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals in the near future, exponentially increasing the data processing power of computers.

He later added two inferences: As technology evolved, computers would become more and more expensive to build, but consumers would pay less and less because so many would be sold. Moore’s law endured for decades.

Combining the genius, leadership, charisma and contacts of Mr. Moore, as well as that of his partner and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, the two brought together a group widely regarded as one of the boldest and most creative engineers of the high-tech industry. technical age.

This was the group that advocated using the mini-thin chips of silicon, a highly polished, chemically treated sand-like substance – one of the most abundant natural resources on Earth – for what turned out to be silicon’s amazing hospitality in housing smaller and smaller electronic circuits that could operate at ever-increasing speeds.

With its silicon microprocessors, the brains of a computer, Intel enabled American manufacturers in the mid-1980s to regain the lead in computer computing from their formidable Japanese competitors. By the 1990s, Intel had put its microprocessors in 80 percent of the computers made worldwide, becoming the most successful semiconductor company in history.

Much of this happened under Mr. Moore’s supervision. He served as CEO from 1975 to 1987, when Andrew Grove succeeded him, and remained chairman until 1997.

As his wealth grew, Mr. Moore also became an important figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife founded the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a donation of 175 million Intel shares. In 2001, they donated $600 million to the California Institute of Technology, the largest gift to a higher education institution at the time. The foundation’s assets currently exceed $8 billion, and it has given away more than $5 billion since its inception.

In interviews, Mr. Moore was characteristically humble about his achievements, particularly the technical advances that Moore’s law made possible.

“What I could see was that semiconductor devices were the way electronics would get cheap. That was the message I was trying to get across,” he told journalist Michael Malone in 2000. “It turned out to be an amazingly accurate prediction — much more accurate than I could have ever imagined.’

Mr. Moore not only predicted that electronics would become much cheaper over time as the industry would shift from discrete transistors and tubes to silicon microchips; over the years, his prediction proved so reliable that technology companies based their product strategy on the assumption that Moore’s Law would hold.

“Any company using rational multi-year planning had to account for this pace of change or else it was going full steam ahead,” said Harry Saal, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Arthur Rock, an early investor in Intel and friend of Mr. Moore, said: “That is his legacy. It’s not Intel. It’s not the Moore Foundation. It’s that sentence: Moore’s law.”

Gordon Earl Moore was born on January 3, 1929 in San Francisco. He grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal town south of San Francisco, where his father, Walter, was a deputy sheriff and his mother’s family, Florence Almira (Williamson) Moore, ran the store.

Mr. Moore enrolled at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University), where he met Betty Whitaker, a journalism student. They married in 1950. That same year, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in chemistry. In 1954 he received his doctorate, also in chemistry, from Caltech.

One of the first jobs he applied for was that of a manager at Dow Chemical. “They sent me to a psychologist to see how this would fit,” Mr. Moore wrote in Engineering & Science magazine in 1994. “The psychologist said I was technically fine, but I was never going to make it.”

So Mr. Moore took a job at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Looking for a way back to California, he interviewed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. it down.”

Instead, Mr. Moore in 1956 along with William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, work at a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, a start-up whose goal was to make a low-cost silicon transistor.

But the company, Shockley Semiconductor, went under Dr. Shockley, who had no experience running a business. In 1957, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce joins a group of defectors who came to be known as “the Treacherous Eight”. With a $500 deposit each, along with $1.3 million in backing from aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild, the eight men set out to found the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which became a pioneer in integrated circuit manufacturing.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce in 1968 to start their own company, focusing on semiconductor memory. They wrote what Mr. Moore described as a “very general” business plan.

“It said we were going to work with silicon,” he said in 1994, “and make interesting products.”

Despite their vague proposal, they had no trouble finding financial support.

With $2.5 million in capital (the equivalent of about $22 million today), Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce named their startup Integrated Electronics Corporation, a name they later shortened to Intel. The third employee was Mr. Grove, a young Hungarian immigrant who had worked at Fairchild under Mr. Moore.

After some indecision over which technology to focus on, the three men opted for a new version of MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) technology called silicon-gate MOS. To connect multiple transistors on a single piece of silicon, they layered aluminum wires on top, creating an integrated circuit.

“Fortunately, very fortunately, we had found a technology that had just the right level of difficulty for a successful launch,” wrote Mr. Moore. “This was how Intel started.”

In the early 1970s, Intel’s 4000 series “computer on a chip” started the revolution in personal computers – although Intel itself missed the chance to make a personal computer, which Mr. Moore partly blamed his own shortsightedness.

“Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me suggesting that Intel should build a computer for the home,” he recalls. “And I asked him, ‘Why on earth would anyone want a computer in their house?'”

Yet he saw the future. In 1963, while at Fairchild as director of research and development, Mr. Moore contributed a chapter to a book describing what would become the precursor to his eponymous law, without the explicit numerical prediction. Two years later, he published an article in Electronics, a widely circulated trade journal, entitled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits”.

“The article presented the same argument as the book chapter, with the addition of this explicitly numerical prediction,” said David Brock, a co-author of “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary” (2015).

There’s little evidence that many people read the article when it was published, Mr. Brock said.

“He kept lecturing with these charts and graphs, and people started using his slides and reproducing his charts,” said Mr. Brock. “Then people saw the phenomenon happen. Silicon microchips became more complex and their costs fell.”

In the 1960s, when Mr. Moore got into electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy over 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars advanced as fast as computers, “they would run 100,000 miles per gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than to park it. (Cars would also be one and a half inches tall.)”

Mr. Moore’s survivors include his wife; two sons, Kenneth and Steven; and four grandchildren.

In 2014, Forbes estimated Mr. Moore at $7 billion. Yet he remained unprepossessing throughout his life, preferring ripped shirts and khakis to tailored suits. He shopped at Costco and kept a collection of fly baits and fishing reels on his desk.

Moore’s law will come to an end as engineers encounter some fundamental physical limits as well as the extreme costs of building factories to reach the next level of miniaturization. And in recent years, the pace of miniaturization has slowed.

Mr. Moore himself commented from time to time on the inevitable end of Moore’s law. “It can’t go on forever,” he said in a 2005 interview with Techworld magazine. “The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.”

Holcomb B. Noble, a former science editor of The Times, died in 2017.