Gordon E. Moore, Co-Founder and Past Chairman of intel corporation, the California semiconductor chipmaker who helped give Silicon Valley its name, achieving the kind of industrial dominance once held by the American railroad or steel company giant of another era, died Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94.
his death was announced by intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. No cause was specified.
Along with a handful of colleagues, Moore could take credit for bringing laptops to hundreds of millions of people and incorporating microprocessors into everything from bathroom scales, toasters, and toy fire trucks to cell phones, cars, and planes.
Mr. Moore had wanted to be a teacher but was unable to get a job in education. He later called himself an “accidental entrepreneur, because he became a billionaire as a result of an initial investment of $500 in the fledgling microchip business, which made electronics 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 LawHe predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future, thus increasing the data-processing power of computers exponentially.
He added two corollaries later: evolving 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 for decades.
Through a combination of the brilliance, leadership, charisma, and connections of Mr. Moore, as well as his partner and Intel co-founder, Roberto Noycethe two formed a group widely regarded as one of the most daring and creative technicians of the high-tech age.
This was the group that advocated the use of miniature thin silicon chips, a highly polished, chemically treated gritty substance, one of the most common natural resources on earth, because of what turned out to be the amazing hospitality of silicon in smaller homes and smaller electronic circuits that could run at ever higher speeds.
With its silicon microprocessors, the brains of a computer, Intel enabled American manufacturers in the mid-1980s to regain leadership in the vast field of computer data processing over their formidable Japanese competitors. By the 1990s, Intel had put its microprocessors in 80 percent of the computers made worldwide, making it the most successful semiconductor company in history.
Much of this happened under the supervision of Mr. Moore. He was CEO from 1975 to 1987, when Andrew Grove succeeded him, and he remained Chairman until 1997.
As his wealth grew, Mr. Moore also became a major figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a gift of 175 million shares of Intel. In 2001, they donated $600 million to the California Institute of Technology, the largest single gift to an institution of higher learning at that time. The foundation’s assets currently exceed $8 billion and it has donated more than $5 billion since its founding.
In interviews, Mr. Moore was characteristically humble about his accomplishments, particularly the technical advances made possible by Moore’s Law.
“What I could see was that semiconductor devices were the way electronics would get cheaper. 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, far more accurate than I ever imagined it would be.”
Mr. Moore not only predicted that electronics would become much cheaper over time, as the industry moved from transistors and discrete 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 business that did rational multi-year planning had to take this rate of change or be crushed,” said Harry Saal, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Arthur Rock, an early investor in Intel and a friend of Moore’s, said: “That’s his legacy. 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, was a deputy sheriff and the family of his mother, Florence Almira (Williamson) Moore, ran the general store.
Mr. 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 same year, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in chemistry. In 1954, he received his Ph.D., 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 this fit together,” Moore wrote in Engineering & Science magazine in 1994. “The psychologist said he was technically fine, but he would never achieve anything.”
So Mr. Moore took a position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. Then, seeking a way back to California, he interviewed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. They offered him a job, he wrote, “but I decided I didn’t want to take specters of nuclear bomb explosions, so I turned down.”
Instead, in 1956, Moore joined William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, to work at a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, a start-up unit whose goal was to make a cheap silicon transistor.
But the company, Shockley Semiconductor, went under under Mr. Shockley, who had no experience running a company. In 1957, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce joined a group of deserters who came to be known as “the eight traitors.” With each contributing $500, along with $1.3 million in endorsement of aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild, the eight men left to form Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which became a pioneer in integrated circuit manufacturing.
Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, 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.
“He said we were going to work with silicon,” he said in 1994, “and make interesting products.”
Despite his vague proposal, they had no trouble finding financial backing.
With capital of $2.5 million (the equivalent of about $22 million today), Moore and Noyce called their new company Integrated Electronics Corporation, a name they later shortened to Intel. The third employee was Mr. Grove, a young Hungarian immigrant who had worked with Mr. Moore at Fairchild.
After some indecision about which technology to focus on, the three men settled on a new version of MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) technology called Silicon Gate MOS. To improve the speed and density of a transistor, they used silicon instead of aluminum.
“Fortunately, by sheer luck, we stumbled upon a technology that had just the right degree of difficulty for a successful start-up,” Mr. Moore wrote. “That was how Intel started.”
In the early 1970s, Intel’s 4000 series “computer on a chip” started the revolution in personal computers, though Intel itself missed the opportunity to make a PC, for which Moore partly blamed his own myopia.
“Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel should build a home computer,” he recalled. “And I asked him, ‘Why the hell would anyone want a computer in their house?’”
Still, he saw the future. In 1963, while at Fairchild as director of research and development, Mr. Moore contributed a chapter to a book that described what would become the precursor to his namesake law, without explicit numerical prediction. Two years later, he published an article in Electronics, a widely circulated trade magazine, titled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.”
“The article 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” (2015).
There is little evidence that many people read the article when it was published, Brock said.
“He kept giving talks with these charts and diagrams, and people started using his slides and reproducing his graphics,” Brock said. “Then people saw the phenomenon happen. Silicon microchips have become more complex and their cost has come down.”
In the 1960s, when Mr. Moore started out in electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy more than 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars moved as fast as computers, they would “get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it. (The cars would also be half an inch long.)
Mr. Moore’s survivors include his wife; two sons, Kenneth and Steven; and four grandchildren.
In 2014, Forbes estimated Moore’s net worth at $7 billion. Yet he remained unattractive throughout his life, preferring tattered shirts and khakis to tailored suits. He shopped at Costco and kept a collection of fly lures and fishing reels on his office desk.
Moore’s Law is bound to come to an end, as engineers encounter some basic physical limits, as well as the extreme cost of building factories to achieve 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 strikes.”
Holcomb B. Noble, former science editor of The Times, died in 2017.
