SAN FRANCISCO, USA – Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, died Friday, March 24, at the age of 94, the company announced.
In an article he wrote in 1965, Moore observed that, thanks to improvements in technology, the number of transistors on microchips had roughly doubled every year since integrated circuits were invented a few years before.and, later amended to every two years, it helped push Intel and rival chipmakers to aggressively target their research and development resources to make sure that rule of thumb came true.
“It sure is nice to be at the right place at the right time,” Moore said in an interview around 2005. “I was very fortunate to get into the semiconductor industry in its infancy. And I had an opportunity to grow from the time where we couldn’t make a single silicon transistor to the time where we put 1.7 billion of them on one chip! It’s been a phenomenal ride.”
A San Francisco native, Moore earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics in 1954 at the California Institute of Technology. Moore described himself to Fortune magazine as an “accidental entrepreneur” who had no burning urge to start a company – but he, Noyce and Grove formed a powerhouse partnership.
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