Gordon Moore (1929–2023)

Gordon Moore played a pivotal part in the development of the semiconductor technology and industry in the United States, co-founding both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. He made the observation about the development of computing power now known as Moore’s Law, and established the technology road map for semiconductors that drove innovation in microelectronics, in accordance with the law, for nearly one-quarter of a century. He died on 24 March, aged 94.

Moore grew up in Pescadero, a small farming town on the California coast, south of San Francisco. At a young age, he took an avid interest in chemistry and experimented with explosives in his home laboratory. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a doctorate in physical chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. His life changed in 1956, when William Shockley, a physics Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the transistor, recruited him as a research chemist at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory he had recently founded in what became Silicon Valley. There, Moore learned the complex and highly experimental techniques required to produce diodes and transistors made of silicon.

In 1957, Moore and seven other scientists and engineers on the Shockley staff rebelled against their abusive and mercurial boss, establishing the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation to specialize in high-quality silicon devices. Moore quickly became the head of the firm’s research laboratory. Under his leadership, the lab made two major innovations, the integrated circuit and the ‘planar’ transistor manufacturing process that allowed the production of reliable devices with excellent electrical characteristics. Moore gave his researchers a lot of freedom. For much of the 1960s, his lab remained the most productive in the US microelectronics industry.

Moore’s law is not just for computers

In 1965, Moore published his now-famous article, ‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’, in Electronics, a trade magazine. He argued that integrated circuits would rapidly grow in complexity, driving down the cost of electronic functions. ‘Moore’s plot’ showed that the number of components per microchip had doubled each year since the development of the planar transistor in 1959. He predicted that this trend would continue for ten more years. In his view, competitiveness and continued profitability in the microelectronics industry depended on it.

Moore used his plot to identify a new technical and commercial opportunity — semiconductor memory chips. This led him and Robert Noyce to leave Fairchild and found NM Electronics in 1968, the company that later became Intel. Under Moore’s direction, Intel’s engineers developed a process that used a new material, polysilicon, to form the gates of transistors that control whether they are switched on and off. This revolutionary process enabled the corporation to introduce microchips with the most transistors to the market — memory chips first and microprocessors later. Moore and his associates at Intel and Caltech also heavily promoted Moore’s plot in the semiconductor community to boost investment in the continued complexification of integrated circuits. As a result, Moore’s plot became increasingly known as Moore’s Law in the late 1970s.