Gordon Moore, a founding father of Silicon Valley whose work in the chip industry catalyzed computing, died Friday at 94, with his passing marking the further end of a golden era for the technology industry.
An Intel INTC co-founder who played an integral role in several of the earliest semiconductor companies, he is perhaps best known for coming up with Moore’s Law, a prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. This ultimately predicted how fast computing would evolve.
Moore was instrumental in three of the earliest companies to experiment with and commercialize integrated circuits and the first semiconductors that helped give Silicon Valley its name. After leaving Shockley, he went on to co-found Fairchild Semiconductor, where along with Robert Noyce, he played a key role in the first commercial production of silicon transistors and later the world’s first commercially viable integrated circuits.
In 1968, Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and co-founded Intel Corp. INTC , quickly adding chip-industry legend Andy Grove to their roster. After some early fits and starts, including abandoning memory chips, one of its first businesses, Intel would go on to become the largest semiconductor maker in the world as the developer of core microprocessors for personal computers.
“It is impossible to imagine the world we live in today, with computing so essential to our lives, without the contributions of Gordon Moore,” Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s current chief executive, said in a statement. “He will always be an inspiration to our Intel family and his thinking at the core of our innovation culture.”
But as transistors have become infinitesimally smaller and the laws of physics have been tough to battle, some in the semiconductor industry have proclaimed the end of Moore’s Law and have been seeking other ways to boost computing power.
Technology Technology Latest News, Technology Technology Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: WSJ - 🏆 98. / 63 Read more »