Gordon Moore, credited for bringing PCs to millions of homes, dies at 94

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, passed away on Saturday at the age of 94. In a press release, the technology firm said he was surrounded by his family at his home in Hawaii and died peacefully. They did not provide a cause.

Credited for devising “Moore’s Law” which would shape the entire semiconductor industry for years to come, Moore helped give Silicon Valley its name.

“Accidental entrepreneur” Moore, along with his partner and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, can be credited for bringing computers to millions of people around the world.

“Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his insight and vision. He was instrumental in unlocking the power of transistors and inspired technologists and entrepreneurs throughout the decades. We at Intel Let’s continue to be inspired by Moore’s Law and intend to apply it until the periodic table is exhausted,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel about Moore’s death.

But perhaps the best description came from Andy Bryant, former chairman of Intel’s board of directors, who said that Moore was a “brilliant scientist, a straight talker and an astute businessman who sought to improve the world.”

Who was Gordon Moore?

Known to many as the co-founder of Intel, Moore’s story began much earlier. Moore was born in 1929 in San Francisco. After graduating from San Jose State University, Moore went to Caltech and received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954.

He began his career as a manager at Dow Chemical. Soon, he began working at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University in Maryland.

It was in 1956 when Moore’s appointment with transistors and semiconductors began. He joined William Shockley to work at a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories. Shockley invented the transistor, and Bell Labs wanted to make cheap silicon transistors.

But Shockley, as good a scientist as he was, was not that good a businessman. Shockley Semiconductor, as the division was called, failed.

In 1957, Moore, Noyce, and six others left Bell Labs and formed Fairchild. Semiconductor Corporation. The “traitorous eight” became pioneers in the manufacture of integrated circuits, or semiconductor chips, as we call them today.

Birth of Intel and the personal computer revolution

In 1968 Moore and Noyce decided to form their own company. With a capital of $2.5 million, they founded the Integrated Electronics Corporation, which we now know as Intel.

To improve the speed and density of the transistor, they decided to use silicon to make the chips instead of aluminum. They were also joined by Andy Grove, a young Hungarian who would later succeed Moore as head of Intel.

The company changed the way computers were used, making them affordable and bringing them home to millions. Even today, Intel is the world’s largest maker of processor chips.

Moore became president and CEO of the company in 1979. He resigned as CEO in 1987, but remained president until 1997.

What is Moore’s Law?

Before founding Intel sometime in 1965, Moore noted that due to technological improvements, the number of transistors on microchips had doubled every year since the chips were invented. He predicted that the trend would continue for years to come.

Although he later amended the law and changed the time to two years, “Moore’s Law” pushed Intel and its rivals to aggressively focus their resources and devise ways to comply with the rule of thumb. He semiconductor The breakneck speed of industry development has long been attributed to Moore’s Law.

The law also had two corollaries. One, evolving technology would make computers more expensive to produce. Second, consumers would still get them at cheaper prices because a lot of PCs would be sold.

In recent years, rivals to Intel such as Nvidia have claimed that Moore’s Law no longer holds as improvements in chip manufacturing have slowed.

But the statement from Intel’s current CEO shows that the company still believes the law is being followed.

The last years of Gordon Moore

After retiring from Intel in 2006, Moore served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation until becoming Chairman Emeritus in 2018. Moore also served as a member of the Conservation Board of Directors. International and Sciences of Gilead.

He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineers, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology from 1995 to early 2001 and continued as a Trustee for Life.

Moore received the National Medal of Technology from then-US President George HW Bush in 1990. In 2002, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US, from George W Bush.