Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, at his home in Hawaii. He was 94. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation said he died peacefully, with his family around him, and Intel announced the news alongside the foundation.
Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore was executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. Four years later he took over as chairman and chief executive, and he held the CEO post until 1987. He stayed on as chairman, became chairman emeritus in 1997 and stepped down in 2006.
The prediction
In 1965 Moore forecast that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. The forecast came to be known as Moore’s Law. In a 2008 interview he described his intent plainly: “All I was trying to do was get that message across, that by putting more and more stuff on a chip we were going to make all electronics cheaper.”
The 1965 prediction held up. In 1975 Moore revised it to a doubling every two years for the following decade. The idea of chips improving at an exponential rate, and getting faster, smaller and cheaper as they did, became the driving force of the semiconductor industry.
Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger said the company remains inspired by Moore’s Law “and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted.” In 2022 Gelsinger renamed Intel’s Ronler Acres campus in Oregon, where teams develop future process technologies, as Gordon Moore Park at Ronler Acres.
Before Intel
Moore was born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929. He studied at San Jose State University and the University of California at Berkeley, then earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1954. His research career began at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. In 1956 he returned to California to join Shockley Semiconductor, the first semiconductor company in what became Silicon Valley.
A year later he and Noyce, with six other colleagues from Shockley, co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor. The company played a central part in the first commercial production of diffused silicon transistors and later the first commercially viable integrated circuits. When Moore and Noyce left to start Intel, they hired Andy Grove as the third employee. The three became known as the “Intel Trinity.”
Frank D. Yeary, chairman of Intel’s board, called Moore “a brilliant scientist and one of America’s leading entrepreneurs and business leaders.” Andy Bryant, the former chairman, remembered him as “a straight-talker and an astute businessperson.”
Philanthropy
Moore and his wife, Betty, gave away much of what Intel earned them. They began with individual gifts, many anonymous, then set up the Moore Family Foundation and in 2000 created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. It has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes. Its focus areas are scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care and the character of the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Though he never aspired to be a household name, Gordon’s vision and his life’s work enabled the phenomenal innovation and technological developments that shape our everyday lives,” foundation president Harvey Fineberg said.
President George H.W. Bush awarded Moore the National Medal of Technology in 1990. President George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Betty, his wife of 72 years, survives him, along with sons Kenneth and Steven and four grandchildren.
