Gordon E. Moore

Cofounder and CEO of Intel

• Born: January 3, 1929
• Place of Birth: San Francisco, California
• Died: March 24, 2023
• Place of Death: Waimea, Hawaii

Primary Company/Organization: Intel

Introduction

Chemist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Gordon Moore was a founding father of the Silicon Valley culture. One of the so-called Traitorous Eight who left the company of Nobel laureate William Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor, he predicted in 1965 that the power and complexity of silicon chips would double every year for ten years, accompanied by decreases in cost. Three years after he made his famous postulation, which came to be known as Moore's law, he cofounded Intel Corporation, the world's leading manufacturer of silicon chips. After twenty-seven years at Intel, he retired and with his wife established the Gordon E. and Betty Moore Foundation, which has contributed billions of dollars to education, scientific research, and the environment.

Early Life

Gordon Earle Moore was born on January 3, 1929, in San Francisco, California. He spent the first decade of his life in Pescadero, a small farming community south of the city, where his father, Walter Harold Moore, was deputy sheriff, and the family of his mother, Florence Williamson Moore, owned a general store. A promotion for his father required the family to move to Redwood City, California, in 1939.

Thanks to a neighbor's chemistry set, Moore developed an interest in chemistry when he was just a boy and by the time he was twelve had decided to become a chemist. In high school, however, athletics had become more important to him than academics. Although mathematics and science came easily to him, he was a disinterested student. He lettered in four sports, and it was not until his senior year that he became a serious student. After graduation from Sequoia High School, he entered San Jose State University, becoming the first member of his family to attend college. He spent two years at San Jose State and then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1950. He and his college sweetheart, Betty Whittaker, were married in 1950, shortly before he entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics.

Moore accepted a position with the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He spent two and a half years at Johns Hopkins, but Moore was more interested in practical applications than in research. He was ready for a change, and both he and his wife were eager to return to California. By this time, the Moores had a son, Kenneth. A second son, Steven, was born in 1959.

Life's Work

Moore was still at Johns Hopkins when he received a phone call from William Shockley, coinventor of the transistor and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley was looking for a chemist to join the newly established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments. In 1956, Moore became the eighteenth person Shockley hired for the new company. While Shockley's brilliance in his field was undeniable, he was less talented in dealing with people. Many of the young men Shockley hired found working for him increasingly difficult. When he decided to table the work on a silicon transistor that had attracted them to his company, their dissatisfaction increased. Eight of the engineers, all between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-four, wanted to continue to work together. Their idea was to find a company that would hire all eight of them. A young Harvard M.B.A., Arthur Rock, suggested they start their own company instead. On September 18, 1957, Moore along with C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert N. Noyce, Victor H. Grinich, Julius Blank, Jay T. Last, and Jean A. Hoerni left Shockley to do just that; they were termed the Traitorous Eight or, less pejoratively, the Fairchild Eight by the media. Rock, after forty-one rejections, found an investor in Sherman M. Fairchild, a pioneer in the fields of photography and aviation and the founder of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation and the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. With $1.5 million from Fairchild and $500 from each of the eight men, the group founded Fairchild Semiconductor. The company developed the manufacturing process for the earliest silicon chips and invented the first commercially produced integrated circuit. Because not many start-up companies could be found in California's Santa Clara Valley in the late 1950s, the eight are also credited with sparking the creation of what later was called Silicon Valley. By some estimates, as many as four hundred companies trace their beginnings to these eight men. Moore served as manager of engineering from 1957 to 1959 and as director of research and development at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation from 1959 to 1968.

On April 19, 1965, Moore published an article in Electronics in which he predicted that the integrated circuit would annually, over the next ten years, double the number of transistors implanted on a computer chip. Based on Noyce's discovery in 1959 that an entire circuit could be created on a single chip, Moore's prediction also included proportionate decreases in costs. Four years earlier, the U.S. Patent Office had awarded the first patent for an integrated chip to Fairchild, inaugurating the age of the microchip. Moore's prediction, which came to be known as Moore's law, with some revision proved accurate over the next thirty years.

Despite the success of Fairchild, Moore was growing frustrated with the pace of production. When the board of directors passed over Noyce and hired an outsider as chief executive officer (CEO) in 1968, Noyce decided to leave. Moore agreed that the time was right for departure. With a one-page proposal in hand, the two approached venture capitalist Rock. He was intrigued and within two days had secured twenty-five investors for the new company. By July 1968, Intel had been launched. From the beginning, the company was known for its innovation. Its first product, a bipolar microchip manufactured in 1969, was used in the automation of chicken houses, in electronic marijuana sniffers, and in blood analysis. In 1970, the company invented dynamic random access memory (DRAM), used for data-storage chips in computers, and a year later they created the first microprocessor for Busicom, a Japanese manufacturer of calculators. The one chip Intel proposed to replace the thirteen complex circuits Busicom thought they needed became the Intel 4004. When Intel bought the rights back from Busicom for Busicom's initial $65,000 development investment, Intel was free to use the microprocessor in other applications, and Intel's place as the leader of the computer industry was secure.

It was Moore who argued for selling IBM a piece of Intel to provide the capital to develop the processors, and it was Moore who saw the company's future in microprocessors. Intel became the world's largest and wealthiest maker of semiconductor chips, and Moore himself became one of America's wealthiest citizens. Moore served as president and CEO of Intel from 1975 to 1979 and as chairman and CEO from 1979 to 1987. He turned over the CEO's job to Andrew Grove in 1987 but remained as chairman for another decade. He was part of the company's leadership in 1993, when Intel released its Pentium processor with 3.1 million transistors. A mandatory retirement-age policy he himself had helped implement forced him to yield the chairmanship to Grove in 1997. Moore served as chairman emeritus from 1997 until 2001.

In 1965, when Moore wrote the essay in which he articulated the premise that became Moore's law, mainframe computers required wings of buildings to house them and cost more than a million dollars. Moore's recognition that the silicon microchip would revolutionize the computer industry to the degree that computers would become as common in offices and homes as typewriters was visionary. An idea man, known as much for his humility as for his achievements, Moore was a key player in the personal computer revolution. As such, he was featured along with other key players in the PC revolution in the 2011 documentary feature, Something Ventured.

Personal Life

By the time his role at Intel was decreasing, Moore was involved in other activities. An avid fisherman and outdoorsman, in 1990 he became a director of Conservation International (CI), an environmental organization that works through corporations and governments to protect and preserve wilderness areas and biodiversity. He had donated $35 million to CI by 1998. In 2000, he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and in 2001 he announced the he and his wife planned to donate $261 million to CI over the next ten years. The foundation now awards approximately $200 million annually to environmental, educational, and research causes and became the largest donor to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), contributing $50 million for its design and pledging an additional $200 million toward its construction. TMT, which will be the largest and most advanced land-based telescope in the world, is being built on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The Moores were part-time residents of Hawaii.

Moore received many honors over his long career. Among the most prestigious are the Computer Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), in 1984; the National Medal of Technology, which honors the country's greatest technical innovators, in 1990; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2002. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of fame in 2009. Additionally, the Society of Chemical Industry presents the annual Gordon Moore Medal to recognize chemists for successful innovation early in their careers.

Moore died in Hawaii in 2023.

Bibliography

Homans, Charles. “Moore's Flaw.” Foreign Policy 182 (2010):31–32. Print.

Lécuyer, Christophe, and David C. Brock. Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Moore, Gordon. “Laying Down the Law.” Interview by Robert Buderi. Technology Review 104.4 (2001): 64. Print.

---. “Moore Looks Beyond the Law.” Interview by Jermey N. A. Matthews. Physics Today 61.3 (2008): 20. Print.

Noble, Holcomb B., and Katie Hafner. "Gordon E. Moore, Intel Co-Founder Behind Moore's Law, Dies at 94." The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/technology/gordon-moore-dead.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age. New York: Norton, 1997. Print.