Gordon E Moore: an accidental entrepreneur who pioneered the chip industry revolution

AP

Gordon Moore, founder of Intel Corp. and Chairman Emeritus, smiles during a tour to the new Gordon and Betty Moore Material Research Building at Stanford University.

Gordon E Moore

Cofounder and former chairman of

Intel

Corp., the California semiconductor chipmaker, has died at his Hawaiian home. He was responsible for giving Silicon Valley its name. He was 94 years old. Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation confirmed his death. They didn't provide any cause.

Moore, along with a few colleagues, could be credited for bringing laptop computers within reach of hundreds of millions of people.

microprocessors

In everything, from bathroom scales, toaster ovens and toy fire engine toy fire engines, to cellphones, cars, and jets.

Moore, who wanted to become a teacher, but couldn't get a job as an educator, later called himself the accidental entrepreneur. He became a billionaire after investing $500 in the microchip company, which transformed electronics into one the largest industries in the world.

His colleagues believed that he saw the future. In 1965, what was known as

Moore's Law

He predicted that the number and frequency of transistors that could fit on a silicon chip would increase exponentially in the future.

Two corollaries were added later by Moore: While computers would become more expensive due to the advancement of technology, consumers would still be charged less because so many computers would be sold. Moore's Law has been valid for many decades.

The two men gathered a team that is widely considered to be among the most innovative and bold high-tech technicians in the world. They combined Moore's brilliance and leadership skills with Robert Noyce (Intel co-founder). This group advocated for the use of tiny silicon chips. These small silicon chips were highly polished and chemically treated. They are one of the most widely used natural resources on Earth. It was because of their incredible hospitality in housing smaller and more efficient electronic circuitry that could run at higher and higher speeds. Intel's silicon microprocessors were the brains of computers and allowed American manufacturers to take over the computer data-processing industry from its formidable Japanese rivals in the mid-1980s. Intel was the largest semiconductor company and had its microprocessors installed in over 80% of all computers worldwide by the 1990s. Moore was responsible for much of this. Moore was the CEO of the company from 1975 to 1987. Andrew Grove succeeded him and he remained chairman until 1997.

Moore rose in stature as a result of his increasing wealth.

philanthropy

He and his wife, Betty Moore, created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2001 with a donation totaling 175 million Intel shares. They donated $600 million to California Institute of Technology in 2001. This was the largest single gift ever made to an institution of higher education. It has given away over $5 billion since its inception and currently holds assets of $8 billion.

Moore, in interviews, was characteristically modest about his accomplishments, especially the technical advancements that Moore's Law enabled. "What I saw was that semiconductor devices would be the way electronics became cheap. He stated that this was the message he was trying to convey to Michael Malone, a journalist in 2000. It turned out to have been an astonishingly precise prediction, much more accurate than I could have imagined. Moore predicted that electronics would become cheaper as the industry moved from discrete transistors to tubes to silicon microchips. His prediction was so accurate that technology companies based their product strategies on Moore's Law. Harry Saal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and long-time investor, said that any business planning rationally over a multiyear period had to assume such a rate of change. Arthur Rock, an early investor and friend of Moore's, said that "that's his legacy." It's not Intel. It's not the Moore Foundation. Moore's Law is the phrase. Born in San Francisco on January 3, 1929, Gordon Earl Moore was a father and a grandfather. Moore grew up in Pescadero (a small coastal community south of San Francisco), where his father, Walter H. Moore was deputy sheriff. His mother, Florence Almira Williamson's family, owned the general store. Moore attended San Jose State College, now San Jose State University. There he met Betty Whitaker who was a journalist student. They were married in 1950. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley that year. He received his doctorate in chemistry from Caltech in 1954. He applied for the job of Dow Chemical manager as one of his first jobs. Moore wrote that Dow Chemical sent Moore to a psychologist in 1994 to assess his suitability. Moore wrote that the psychologist told me I was technically fine, but I couldn't manage anything. Moore accepted a job at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. He then applied for a job at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Moore was offered a job but he declined because he didn't want the spectra of nuclear explosions. Moore joined William Shockley in 1956 to work as a West Coast division at Bell Laboratories. This unit was a start-up that aimed to produce a silicon transistor for a low price. Shockley Semiconductor was founded by Moore, but Shockley had no prior experience in running a business. Moore and Noyce were part of a group known as the "traitors eight" in 1957. Each man contributed $500 and Sherman Fairchild gave $1.3 million to support them. The eight men formed Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. which was a pioneer in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. Moore and Noyce were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and formed their own company in 1968, focusing on semiconductor memories. Moore called it a "very general business plan." In 1994, Moore said that the plan stated they were going to use silicon to create interesting products. They were able to find financial support despite their vague proposal. Moore and Noyce had $2.5 million capital and called their startup Integrated Electronics Corp.. They later changed it to Intel. Grove, a young Hungarian immigrant from Hungary who worked under Moore at Fairchild, was the third employee. After much debate about which technology to focus on, the men settled on a new MOS version - metal oxide semiconductor. This technology is called silicon-gate MOS. They used silicon to improve the transistor's speed, density, and speed. Moore wrote that they had found a technology that was just right for a successful startup in 1994. Moore said, "Thanks to a lot of luck, we had struck on a technology which had just the right amount of difficulty." This was how Intel started. The revolution in personal computers began with the introduction of Intel's 4000 series "computer-on-a-chip" in the 1970s. However, Intel missed an opportunity to produce a computer, which Moore attributed partly to his own blindness. He wrote that "Long before Apple, a one of our engineers approached me with the suggestion to Intel that he should build a computer to use in the home." "And I asked him: "What's the point of a computer in a home?" He saw the future. Moore, who was still Fairchild's director of research, wrote a chapter in a book that described what would become his law. However, he did not make any numerical predictions. He published an article in Electronics two years later titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". David Brock, coauthor of Moore's Law: Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary, stated that the article presented the same arguments as the book chapter but added a numerical prediction. Brock stated that there is not much evidence that the article was read by many people at the time it was published. Brock stated that he gave talks using these plots and charts, and people began to use his slides and reproduce his graphs. "The phenomenon was then seen by many. The complexity of silicon microchips increased and the cost fell. A single silicon transistor was $150 in the 1960s when Moore started working in electronics. In the future, $10 would purchase more than 100,000,000 transistors. Moore once said that cars would travel 100,000 miles per gallon if they were as fast as computers. It would also be cheaper to purchase a Rolls-Royce rather than park it. The cars would also measure half an inch in length. Moore's survivors are his wife, his sons Kenneth, Steven, and four grandchildren. Forbes valued Moore's net worth as $7 billion in 2014. He was modest throughout his entire life and preferred tattered shirts to tailored suits. He frequented Costco and kept a small collection of fishing reels and fly lures on his desk. Moore's Law will eventually come to an end as engineers face basic physical limitations and the high cost of building factories in order to realize the next level. In recent years, miniaturization has slowed down. Moore commented on occasions the inevitable ending of Moore's Law. In a 2005 interview, Moore stated that "it can't go on forever." "The nature exponentials is that they push them out, and eventually disaster happens."