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Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law

In 1965, Gordon E. Moore was solicited for a contribution to the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Electronics magazine. Asked specifically for his ideas regarding the future of the semiconductor industry, Moore sought to explain the cost advantages of integrated circuits and how they would become much less expensive through time. By amalgamating multiple transistors and other devices in a single chip, integrated circuits were in theory cheaper than discrete, single-function transistors and other types of discrete semiconductors. In 1965, however, the price of integrated circuits remained high, limiting their use primarily to mainframe computers, defense electronics, and other capital-intensive equipment.

From his perspective as research and development director at Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore envisaged a regular decline in the cost of integrated circuits. He reasoned that as engineering prowess and manufacturing techniques became more sophisticated, more devices could be placed on a single integrated circuit, thus reducing costs, while simultaneously increasing the functionality of integrated circuits. Larger integrated circuits, Moore believed, would motivate greater cost efficiencies.

Reviewing the development of integrated circuits since their invention in 1959, and in particular since 1962, and examining the next generations of chips then in development at the Fairchild laboratories, Moore noticed that the number of discrete transistors and other components incorporated onto a single integrated circuit had increased at a regular rate, approximately doubling every year. He noted three technology advances that would enable this increase to continue: The first was the improvement in semiconductor lithography, the process by which tiny components were printed onto silicon wafers and a factor in decreasing component size, allowing more transistors on each chip. Second, the size of the silicon wafers, on which integrated circuits were printed, would become larger, allowing bigger chips and more integrated circuits to be manufactured on a single wafer. Third, advancements in forming components on integrated circuits would result in further miniaturization and integration. Such technological progress, combined with the inherent cost efficiencies of integration, would make electronics useful and available throughout society.

In 1965, Fairchild’s most advanced integrated circuits contained approximately sixty components. Moore predicted that during the next ten years integrated circuits would contain sixty thousand components. Moore’s prediction was remarkably prescient. His article also suggested that integrated circuit advancements would make possible home computers, electronics in automobiles, electronic wristwatches, personal mobile communications, and other future devices. In 1975, he revisited his original thesis and predicted that the rate of growth would slow to a doubling of component integration about once every two years. Again, Moore was correct.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, microprocessors and other kinds of integrated circuits contain millions of components of smaller-than-microscopic dimensions, while the cost per function of each individual component has continued to decline. Moore’s friend Carver Mead, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, eventually coined the term “Moore’s law” for the concepts that Moore set forth.


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Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy

Gordon E. Moore

by Eric Schuster

American inventor, computer engineer, and industrialist

Moore, a cofounder of the Intel Corporation, is a highly regarded figure in the history of the semiconductor industry. He is the author of Moore’s law, a hypothesis about the cost and ubiquity of integrated circuit technology.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; patents; computer industry

Bequeathal of wealth: Charity; educational institution

Early Life

Gordon Earle Moore was born in San Francisco, California, in 1929. His father was a police officer in San Mateo County, California, and his mother was a homemaker. Both parents were born in Pescadero, California, where Moore grew up. His father, who never finished grammar school, worked continuously through the Great Depression. The household had electricity and a telephone, and the family kept a cow that was milked daily. The family moved to Redwood City, California, in 1939. Math was Moore’s strong subject and chemistry was his hobby. He attended high school from 1942 to 1946 and San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) from 1946 to 1948. He transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1950 with a degree in chemistry. In 1950, Moore entered the California Institute of Technology, where in 1954 he received his Ph.D. in chemistry and physics.

Moore met his wife, Betty, when they were students at San Jose State College. The couple wed in 1950 and had two sons, Kenneth G. Moore and Steven B. Moore.

First Ventures

Moore worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory, a U.S. government facility at Johns Hopkins University, from 1953 to 1956. In 1956, William Shockley, one of the three engineers credited with the invention of the transistor in 1947, sought Moore for a position in Shockley’s new company. Moore accepted a job at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, in 1956. While there, Moore met and worked with Robert Norton Noyce, who along with Jack St. Clair Kilby is credited with inventing the integrated circuit, a type of semiconductor device that combined several transistors and other components on a single chip of silicon.

Dissatisfied with management, Moore, Noyce, and several other engineers left Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor, headed by Noyce, as a division of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. Each of the founding engineers, Moore included, invested $500 in the new company. Moore served as head of engineering and then as director of research and development, focusing on the production of silicon-diffused junction transistors and the introduction of the planar process of silicon device manufacturing. In 1959, Noyce patented his ideas for making integrated circuits using the planar process, and Fairchild became the market leader in these devices in the 1960’s, earning annual revenues of $150 million. Integrated circuits greatly reduced the size, complexity, and cost of computers and computer-powered equipment, and they were used extensively in the computer, defense, and electronic equipment industries. Fairchild pioneered other integrated circuit technologies, including the complementary metal oxide semiconductor manufacturing process. In 1965, while at Fairchild, Moore published an influential article titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”

Mature Wealth

Unsure of the direction of Fairchild’s leadership, Moore and Noyce left to found the Intel Corporation in July, 1968, using personal money, as well as funding from the noted California venture capitalist Arthur Rock. Initially called N. M. Electronics, the company soon changed its name to Intel, created from a contraction of the two words “integrated” and “electronics.” First year sales totaled only $2,672. The company began working on memory chips, semiconductor devices that store information, and soon introduced the first commercially available dynamic random access memory devices.

In 1971, Intel accepted a contract from Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation to develop specialized integrated circuits for a new desktop calculator. Instead of a set of twelve separate devices, Intel engineers created a set of four chips, including one that could be specifically programmed for different, custom computer applications. The Intel model 4004 device was the first general microprocessor, a computer chip that could be programmed with software to perform a variety of processes. Containing twenty-three hundred transistors and other components on a single chip, the microprocessor paved the way for desktop computing and for the rapid evolution of industrial, personal, and mobile electronics.

Intel began selling stock in 1971 at a price of $23.50 per share. The Intel 8080 microprocessor, introduced in 1974, became the industry standard, and in 1981 International Business Machines (IBM) chose the Intel 8088 microprocessor to run its first personal computer. In 1975, Intel’s revenues were $130 million, and by 1992 the company had become the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. In 2008, Intel’s total revenues exceeded $37 billion. Moore’s personal wealth is estimated to be more than $4 billion.

Moore was elected president and chief executive officer of Intel in 1975. He retired to become board chairman in 1987 and served in that position until 1997, when he became Intel’s chairman emeritus. Moore was a member of the board of trustees of the California Institute of Technology from 1987 to 1995, and he served as board chairman from 1995 until 2001. In 1990, Moore was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George H. W. Bush, and in 2002 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2000, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was established to fund efforts in environmental conservation, science, and initiatives in the San Francisco Bay area. The organization was then the eighth-largest private foundation in the United States. The foundation provides significant support to Conservation International, an organization that seeks to protect the Earth’s biodiversity. In 2001, the California Institute of Technology received $600 million from the foundation and from Gordon and Betty Moore, at the time the largest private donation given to an institution of higher learning. In his retirement, Moore became a tireless campaigner for environmental conservation and an avid practitioner of the sport of fishing.

Legacy

Moore is known as one of the fathers of Silicon Valley, the high-technology industry area in California near the city of San Francisco. He is widely respected for his business acumen, though he calls himself an accidental entrepreneur, and his modest and gentle character. Moore’s legacy includes creating and commercializing the semiconductor technologies that drove the computer, software, and Internet revolutions of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is also a founder of the modern semiconductor industry, which in 2008 had global revenues of $261 billion and supplied devices used in every imaginable electronic product. Moore’s commitments to education and environmental conservation have set an example of philanthropy that is emulated around the world.

Further Reading

1 

Brock, David C., ed. Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2006. Published following a seminar celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Moore’s law, this edition contains drafts of Gordon Moore’s seminal 1965 and 1975 articles, as well as scholarly analyses by several authorities on the significance of Moore’s predictions.

2 

Economist. “Happy Birthday: Moore’s Law at Forty.” 374, no. 8419 (March 26, 2005). Overview of the man behind Moore’s law.

3 

IEEE Design and Test of Computers. “Gordon E. Moore: A Pioneer Looks Back at Semiconductors.” 16, no. 2 (April-June, 1999): 8-14. Detailed interview with Moore about his role in technology history.

4 

Issac, R. D. “The Future of CMOS Technology.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 44, no. 3 (May, 2000): 369-378. Scholarly investigation of the applicability of Moore’s law to advances in semiconductor technology.

5 

Lenzer, Robert. “The Reluctant Entrepreneur.” Forbes 156, no. 6 (September 11, 1995): 162-166. Examines Moore’s business practices and philosophy.

6 

Moore, Gordon E. “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965). Moore’s influential article, in which he accurately predicted the benefits, costs, and functions of integrated circuits.

7 

_______. “Progress in Digital Electronics.” In Technical Digest 1975: International Electron Devices Meeting, December 1, 2, and 3, 1975, Washington, D.C., Sponsored by IEEE Group on Electron Devices. New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1975. Reprint of Moore’s 1975 speech, wherein he reconsiders and expands on his famous 1965 article.

8 

O’Reilly, Brian. “From Intel to the Amazon: Gordon Moore’s Incredible Journey.” Fortune 139, no. 8 (April 26, 1999): 166-190. Moore as seen through the lens of his conservation philanthropy.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Schuster, Eric. "Gordon E. Moore." Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy, edited by Howard Bromberg, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLIW_1279369001279.
APA 7th
Schuster, E. (2010). Gordon E. Moore. In H. Bromberg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Schuster, Eric. "Gordon E. Moore." Edited by Howard Bromberg. Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.