Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel and inventor of Moore’s Law, dies aged 94 – 03/25/2023 – Market

Gordon E. Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corp., the California semiconductor chip maker that helped give Silicon Valley its name, achieving the industrial dominance once occupied by the American railroads or steel mills of another era, died on Friday (24) at his home in Hawaii. He was 94 years old.

His death was confirmed by Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, without naming the cause.

With a handful of colleagues, Moore could claim credit for bringing laptop computers to hundreds of millions of people and embedding microprocessors in everything from bathroom scales to toasters and toy cars, cell phones, automobiles and jet planes.

Moore wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t get a job in education and later called himself an accidental entrepreneur. He became a billionaire as a result of an initial $500 investment in the fledgling microchip business, which turned electronics into one of the biggest industries in the world.

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

He added two corollaries later: the evolution of technology would make computers more and more expensive to build, but consumers would be charged less and less for them because so many would be sold. Moore’s Law held true for decades.

Through a combination of Moore’s brilliance, leadership, charisma and connections, as well as those of his partner and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, a group was formed that is widely regarded as one of the most daring and creative of the era. of high technology.

It was this group that championed the use of fingernail-thick silicon chips — a highly polished, chemically treated gritty substance, one of Earth’s most common natural resources — because of what turned out to be silicon’s incredible ability to house circuits. smaller and smaller electronics that operated at ever-increasing speeds.

With its silicon microprocessors – the brains of a computer – Intel allowed American manufacturers in the mid-1980s to regain leadership in the vast field of computer data processing from their formidable Japanese competitors. By the 1990s, Intel had put its microprocessors in 80% of the computers manufactured worldwide, making it the most successful semiconductor company in history.

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

As his wealth grew, Moore became a leading figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife created 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, at the time the largest single donation to an institution of higher learning. The foundation’s assets currently exceed $8 billion, and it has donated more than $5 billion since its inception.

In interviews, Moore was characteristically humble about his accomplishments, particularly the technical advances that Moore’s Law made possible.

“What I could see was that semiconductor devices were how electronics would become cheap. That was the message I was trying to convey,” he told journalist Michael Malone in 2000. “It turned out to be an incredibly accurate prediction, much more than than I ever imagined.”

Moore not only predicted that electronics would become much cheaper over time as the industry shifted from a few 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 that does rational multi-year planning must assume this rate of change, or it will be crushed,” said Harry Saal, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

“That’s his legacy,” said Arthur Rock, an early investor in Intel and a friend of Moore’s. “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, California. He grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal town south of San Francisco, where his father, Walter H. Moore, was deputy sheriff and the family of his mother, Florence Almira Williamson, owned the general store.

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

One of the first jobs he applied for was as a manager at Dow Chemical. “They sent me to a psychologist to see how it would fit,” Moore wrote in 1994. “The psychologist said I was fine technically but I would never be a manager.”

So Moore took a position at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. In seeking a way back to California, he was interviewed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. He was offered a job, but decided he “didn’t want to take on the specter of exploding nuclear bombs, so I turned it down,” he wrote.

Instead, in 1956, Moore joined William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, to work in a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, a new unit whose goal was to manufacture an inexpensive silicon transistor.

But the company, Shockley Semiconductor, foundered under Shockley, who had no management experience. In 1957, Moore and Noyce joined a group of defectors who became known as “the Traitor Eight”. With each investing $500, along with $1.3 million from aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild, the eight set out to form Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., which became a pioneer in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

Instigated by entrepreneurship, Moore and Noyce decided in 1968 to form their own company, focusing on semiconductor memory. They wrote what Moore described as a “very general” business plan.

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

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

With capital of $2.5 million, Moore and Noyce named their startup Integrated Electronics Corp., which they later shortened to Intel. The third employee was Grove, a young Hungarian immigrant who had worked for Moore at Fairchild.

After some indecision about which technology to focus on, the three decided on a new version of MOS technology –metal oxide semiconductor– called silicon gate MOS. To improve the speed and density of a transistor, they used silicon instead of aluminum.

“Fortunately, very luckily, we landed on a technology that was just the right degree of difficulty for a successful startup,” Moore wrote in 1994. “That’s how Intel got started.”

In the early 1970s, Intel’s “computer on a chip” 4000 series started the personal computer revolution, although Intel missed the opportunity to manufacture a PC, which Moore blamed in part on his own nearsightedness.

“Long before Apple, one of our engineers suggested to me that Intel should build a computer for home use,” he wrote. “And I said, ‘What the hell would anyone want a computer for at home?'”

Even so, he saw the future. In 1963, while still at Fairchild as director of research and development, Moore contributed a book chapter describing what would become the precursor to his eponymous law, without the explicit numerical prediction. Two years later, he published a widely circulated article in Electronics magazine entitled “Cramming more components into integrated circuits.”

“The paper made the same argument as the book chapter, with the addition of this explicitly numerical prediction,” said David Brock, co-author of “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary” [A Lei de Moore: A vida de Gordon Moore, o revolucionário silencioso do Vale do Silício].

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

“He kept giving talks with charts and graphs, and people started using his slides and playing his graphs,” Brock said. “Then people saw the phenomenon happen. Silicon microchips got more complex and their cost went down.”

In the 1960s, when Moore started in electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy over 100 million transistors. Moore once wrote that if cars advanced as fast as computers, “they would go 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than to park it. (The cars would also be half an inch long .)”

Moore is survived by his wife and children Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.

In 2014, Forbes estimated Moore’s net worth at $7 billion. However, he remained very low-key throughout his life, preferring shabby shirts and khakis to tailored suits. He shopped at Costco and had a collection of lures and fishing reels on his desk.

Moore’s Law is about to come to an end as engineers encounter some basic physical limits, as well as the excessive cost of building factories to reach the next level of miniaturization. And in recent years the pace of miniaturization has slowed.

Moore himself has sometimes commented 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 force them forward, and one day, disaster strikes.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves