Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and creator of ‘Moore’s Law,’ dies at 94

Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, the man credited with creating “Moore’s Law,” which served as a measuring stick and spark for the entire semiconductor industry for decades, passed away Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94 years old.

News of his passing was announced by Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which Moore (pictured) founded alongside his wife in 2000. In 2017, The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted that the couple was California’s most generous donor, giving more than $6.3 billion to “create positive outcomes for future generations.”

Moore was one of the co-founders of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, before leaving that company shortly afterwards to establish Intel alongside his co-founder and friend Robert Noyce. The two were later joined by their first hire Andy Grove, and together, the trio transformed Intel into a Silicon Valley powerhouse and one of the world’s biggest computer chipmakers.

Moore served as executive vice president of Intel until 1975, when he became president. Finally, in 1979, he took on the role of chief executive, a position he held for seven years. In 1987, Moore made way for Grove, though he continued to serve as Intel’s chairman until 1997.

Despite the length of his tenure and the multiple roles he held, Moore was known for Moore’s Law more than anything else. It derived from a prediction he made back in the 1960s, which stated that the capacity and complexity of integrated circuits would double each year, meaning that computer chips would increase their power exponentially.

Moore’s observation was made with regard to the doubling of transistors on a semiconductor, but over the years it was applied to everything, from hard drives and computer monitors to other electronic devices. The idea was that a new generation of products would emerge roughly every 18 months or so that would make the previous generation obsolete. It wasn’t so much a law as a choice made by leading chipmakers such as Intel to take semiconductors to the limit of their physics.

Moore came up with the concept during an interview with Electronics Magazine, which asked him to predict the future of the industry. He never expected his comments to set the standard for the entire technology space.

“It’s the human spirit. It’s what made Silicon Valley,” Carver Mead, a retired California Institute of Technology computer scientist, said in a 2005 interview. It was Mead who first coined the term “Moore’s Law” in the early 1970s.

“When it comes to chip innovation, few people are more iconic than Gordon Moore, who not only established his famous law but was also a very successful researcher and theorist who helped to found one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech titans,” said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “With Intel, Moore helped put Silicon Valley on the map and has shaped our daily lives in so many ways.”

Moore himself was far more modest, saying in 2005 that his prediction was a “lucky guess” that received far more publicity than it deserved.

For some years now, industry watchers have been forecasting the end of Moore’s Law, and there is now disagreement about whether or not it’s dead, or simply slowing down. Intel’s current CEO, Pat Gelsinger, stated in September that Moore’s Law is “alive and well,” just one week after Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang insisted that it’s no longer relevant.

“The method of using brute force transistors and the advances of Moore’s law has largely run its course,” Huang insisted.

Moore himself never seemed particularly perturbed by the debate, spending his later years engaged in philanthropy alongside his wife. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation focused on environmental conservation, science, patient care and other projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a reward for his contributions to the semiconductor industry and his philanthropy, Moore received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., from then-President George W. Bush.

Moore is survived by his wife Betty, two sons and four grandchildren.

Photo: Walden Kirsch/Intel

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