His Inventions Helped Create the Modern World: Remembering Gordon Moore

pcmag.com:

I was saddened to hear about the passing of Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and the engineer perhaps best know for his prediction that transistor density would double every two years, known as Moore's Law.

A native of what would come to be known as Silicon Valley, Moore studied chemistry at UC Berkeley and CalTech. In 1956, he joined Shockley Semiconductor working under William Shockley, known as the co-inventor of the transistor. The following year, Moore was part of a group known as "the traitorous eight," who left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

Moore focused on processes for producing semiconductors, later working with Shockley alumni Jean Horeni, Jay Last, and Robert Noyce on various devices, including the first planar transistors and then the first integrated circuit or "chip." (Jack Kilby at TI created an integrated circuit at the same time, but the planar design was easier to manufacture and became the industry standard).

While at Fairchild, Moore wrote "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics Magazine (A reprint is online here(Opens in a new window).) In the paper, dated April 19, 1965, Moore noted that "the complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly two per year," meaning the number of transistors per chip was doubling every year. In 1975, he revised his prediction to say they would double every two years, a prediction that would stay on target for decades.

In 1968, he and Robert Noyce founded Intel, working with Andrew Grove. Moore was initially executive vice president, but became president in 1975, chairman and CEO in 1979, and chairman in 1987 (when Grove became CEO); by 1997, he was chairman emeritus. While