technology
A Silicon Valley co-founder and true visionary who paved the way for the technological revolution
Co-founder and former CEO of Intel, Gordon Moore, has passed away at the age of 94.
Moore was the last surviving member of Intel Trinity, which also included fellow founder Robert Noyce and first appointee Andy Grove.
Moore and Noyce worked with transistor co-inventor William Shockley, before helping launch the semiconductor company Fairchild.
In 1968, the two struck out on their own and founded NM Electronics, which eventually became Intel.
A few years earlier, in 1965, Moore had written a paper that researched the miniaturization of computers. To be precise, he expected the number of transistors in an integrated circuit to double every year, leading to smaller and more powerful chips that would enable advances in technology.
He dubbed his predictions “Moore’s Law,” and they have proven accurate in the years since. By 1975, he had revised his estimate to double transistors every two years, although now major chipmakers disagree about whether Moore’s Law still applies.
Gordon Moore
In 1979, Moore was appointed Chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation before relinquishing the latter position in 1987. He appears to have acted as an intermediary between Noyce and Grove, and he and Grove were the decision makers behind the focus of Intel” on microprocessors rather than continuing its work in the memory business.
By many estimates, the cost of the transistor has fallen hundreds of millions of times since the early 1960’s.
This development allowed the dissemination of computing and electronics technologies on a large scale, first through personal computers, then various devices, up to the mobile phone.
“The world has lost a giant with the passing of Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Silicon Valley and a true visionary who paved the way for the technological revolution,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a tweet.
Specialists expect that Moore’s Law will soon cease to apply due to the physical limitations associated with integrating transistors into a microprocessor.
Before Moore completely stepped down from his duties at Intel in 2006, he and his wife founded the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with $5 billion in funding.
