Intel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted regular growth in computing power for a long time, died Friday at the age of 94, the company said.
The Intel and Moore Family Philanthropic Foundation reported that he died surrounded by his family at his home in Hawaii.
Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968, was a roll-up engineer in a triumvirate of tech luminaries who eventually put “Intel Inside” processors in over 80% of the world’s personal computers.
In a paper he wrote in 1965, Moore noted that because of technological improvements, the number of transistors in microchips had doubled every 12 months since the invention of integrated circuits a couple of years earlier.
His prediction that the trend would proceed became often called “Moore’s Law” and later modified to a two-year term helped prompt Intel and rival chipmakers to aggressively channel their R&D resources to make sure that rule of thumb will come true.
“Integrated circuits will result in such wonders as home computers – or at least terminals connected to a central computer – automatic control of cars and private portable communications equipment,” Moore wrote in his article, 20 years before the notebook computer revolution and greater than 40 years before Apple released iPhone.
After Moore’s article, chips became more efficient and cheaper at an exponential rate, helping to drive much of the world’s technological progress for half a century and enabling not only the notebook computer, but in addition the web and Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Facebook and Google.
“It’s actually nice to be in the right place at the right time,” Moore said in an interview around 2005. “I used to be very lucky to be in the semiconductor industry in its infancy. And I’ve had the opportunity to grow from the time we couldn’t make a single silicon transistor to the time we put 1.7 billion of them on a single chip! It was an exceptional ride.”
In recent times, Intel’s rivals equivalent to Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) have argued that Moore’s Law now not applies as advances in chip manufacturing have slowed.
But despite manufacturing hiccups which have seen Intel lose market share lately, current CEO Pat Gelsinger said he believes Moore’s Law still applies as the company invests billions of dollars in recovery efforts.
“CANDENT ENTREPRENEUR”
Although Moore anticipated the notebook computer movement, he told Forbes magazine that he didn’t buy a house computer himself until the late Nineteen Eighties.
A native of San Francisco, Moore received his Ph.D. in chemistry and physics in 1954 at the California Institute of Technology.
He went to work at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, where he met future Intel co-founder Robert Noyce. Part of the “traitorous eight”, they left in 1957 to launch Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1968, Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to found a memory chip company that was soon named Intel, short for Integrated Electronics.
Moore and Noyce’s first worker was one other Fairchild colleague, Andy Grove, who led Intel through much of its explosive growth in the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties.
Moore described himself in Fortune magazine as an “accidental entrepreneur” who had no pressing need to start out a business – but he, Noyce and Grove formed a robust partnership.
While Noyce had theories on the way to solve chip engineering problems, Moore was the one who rolled up his sleeves and spent countless hours tweaking transistors and refining Noyce’s broad and sometimes ill-defined ideas, efforts that usually paid off. Grove accomplished the group as an Intel operations and management expert.
Moore’s obvious talent also inspired other engineers working for him, and under his and Noyce’s leadership, Intel invented microprocessors that paved the way for the personal computing revolution.
He was executive chairman until 1975, although he and CEO Noyce considered themselves equals. From 1979 to 1987, Moore served as president and CEO and remained president until 1997.
In 2023, Forbes magazine estimated his net price at $7.2 billion.
Moore was a long-time sport fisherman, pursuing his passion around the world, and in 2000 he and his wife Betty founded a foundation that focused on environmental issues. The muse, which has been involved in projects equivalent to the protection of the Amazon basin and salmon streams in the United States, Canada and Russia, was funded by Moore’s donation of roughly $5 billion in Intel stock.
He has also donated lots of of tens of millions to his alma mater, the California Institute of Technology, to maintain it at the forefront of technology and science, and has supported the Seek for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project often called SETI.
Moore received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President George W. Bush in 2002. He and his wife had two children.