Gordon Earle Moore was born in 3rd January 1929, he is an American co-founder and
Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published
in an article April 19, 1965 in Electronics
Magazine). Under Gordon Moore, Intel introduced the world's first single
chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 invented by Intel engineers.
Moore was born in San Francisco, California, but his family lived
in nearby Pescados where he grew up. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry
from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a PhD in Chemistry and
minor in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1954.
Prior to studying at Berkeley, he spent his freshman and sophomore years at San
José State University, where he met his future wife Betty. Moore completed his
post-doctoral work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
until 1956.
He is also a director of Gilead Sciences Inc., a member of the
National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Engineers. Moore also serves on the board of trustees of the California
Institute of Technology. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1990
and the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from George W.
Bush in 2002.
In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were two unhappy engineers
working for the Fairchild Semiconductor Company who decided to quit and create
their own company at a time when many Fairchild employees were leaving to
create start-ups. People like Noyce and Moore were nicknamed the
"Fairchildren".
Gordon Moore is widely known for "Moore's Law," in which
he predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place
on a computer microchip would double every year. In 1995, he updated his
prediction to once every two years. While originally intended as a rule of
thumb in 1965, it has become the guiding principle for the industry to deliver
ever-more-powerful semiconductor chips at proportionate decreases in cost.
