Gorden Moore, Intel Co-founder And Pioneering Figure In Semiconductor Chip Industry, Passes Away At 94

Gordon Moore, an iconic engineer-entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor, the pioneering manufacturer of transistors and integrated circuits and Intel, the integrated chip design and manufacturing behemoth, has died. He was 94.

Moore died peacefully surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii on Friday, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation said in a statement.

Moore's name became forever linked with semiconductor chips when he predicted that their power would double every year, a maxim that came to be known as "Moore's Law". 

Fairchild Semiconductor's first silicon chip product had merely four transistors embedded in it, but the company soon iteratively found a way to bundle hundreds of transistors.

Moore observed that the number of components that could be embedded on each chip doubled annually as engineers devised ways to fabricate ever smaller transistors. This prediction—that the computing power of chips would grow exponentially—came to be called "Moore's Law".

A San Francisco native, Moore earned a PhD in chemistry and physics in 1954 at the California Institute of Technology.

Moore was part of the 'traitorous eight', a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. 

A Nobel Physic winning physicist, William Shockely set up Shockley Semiconductor to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. He recruited young Ph.D. graduates to work on his company's vision. However, Shockely's authoritarian and highly eccentric leadership style led to the abrupt exit of the young engineers he hired.

Fairchild Semiconductor soon grew into a leader in the semiconductor industry. In 1960, it became an incubator of Silicon Valley and was directly or indirectly involved in creating dozens of corporations, including Intel and AMD.

Unhappy with the lack of stock options in Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore, along with another iconic engineer-entrepreneur Robert Noyce, quit Fairchild and founded Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. The duo envisioned that transistors would become the cheapest product ever produced and the world would consume trillions and trillions of them.

Two years after its founding, Intel launched its first product, a dynamic random access memory or DRAM chip. Introduced in October 1970, 1103 was the first commercially available DRAM, and due to its small physical size and low price relative to magnetic-core memory (a matrix of tiny metal rings strung together by a grid of wires which computers then used to 'remember'), it replaced the latter in many applications.

Moore-Noyce- Grove trio powered Intel through much of its explosive growth in the 1980s and 1990s.

Moore served as the chairman and CEO of Intel from 1979 to 1987 and remained chairman until 1997.

Moore received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour, from President George W. Bush in 2002.