Gordon Moore: the lawgiver of semiconductors
Gordon Earle Moore, one of the giants of the semiconductor industry, died on the 24th March 2023, aged 94. He was born in California and studied there, receiving a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1954. After further post-doctoral studies, Moore joined Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956, just before William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Shockley was a brilliant scientist, the brain behind the invention of the transistor, but a disaster as a manager. He failed to market the products of the Laboratory. Eight of his senior staff, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, rebelled and Shockley branded them the “traitorous eight”. They resigned, and all of them moved over to another company which they founded with the financial help of $1.39 million from the entrepreneur Sherman Fairchild. Their own contribution was $500 apiece. They called the new company Fairchild Semiconductors.
The traitorous eight knew their job. In a couple of years or so they made the company into the leading semiconductor company in the world. The great break-through came with the invention of integrated circuits, when it became possible to put large numbers of transistors on a silicon chip, about the size of a fingernail. Integrated circuits were invented independently at both Texas Instruments and at Fairchild Semiconductors. The crucial innovation was that all the necessary components, transistors, resistances, capacitors, interconnections were produced by the same “planar” technology.
Over the next few years, the capabilities of integrated circuits increased fast. Gordon Moore, Director of Research at the time, was asked in 1964 how he expected the number of transistors on a single chip to increase with time. He thought for a moment, recalled that in the last three years the number of transistors on a chip doubled every year, so he just said it would go on doubling every year. This off the cuff comment has been known in the industry as Moore’s Law ever since.
I remember quoting this at the time to an economist friend of mine. “How long has this been going on?” he asked sharply. “About 23 years,” I said. “Are you suggesting,” my friend’s tone turned to derision, “that you can now put 223 = 8 million of your things on your fingernail?” I said, “Yes.” For an economist, sustained growth of as little as 8% per year seems inconceivable. An increase by a factor of two for 23 subsequent years strained his credulity to the extreme. It took me quite some time to convince him that I was not having him on.
Fairchild Semiconductors was a very successful company. In less than a decade it moved from 12 employees to twelve thousand. However, for Moore’s quick mind this was not fast enough. He, with colleagues Richard Noyce and Andrew Grove, founded a new company called Intel in 1968. They concentrated on producing microprocessors, the building blocks of computers. By the 1990s they produced 80% of the world’s microprocessors. In 2022 their revenue was $63 billion; the number of employees, 131,000.
The emergence of ever more powerful chips (the more transistors on them, the more powerful) changed the way we live. Not everything as yet, but quite a number of things from watches to ski-gloves, became smarter and smarter. The biggest change occurred, of course, in computers. An article published 41 years ago (H.D.Toong and A Gupta, Scientific American, December 1982) made the progress clear by comparing the aircraft industry with that of computers: “If the aircraft industry [had] evolved as spectacularly as the computer industry over the past 25 years… a Boeing 767 would cost $500 today and it would circle the globe in 20 minutes on five gallons of fuel.”
Becoming rich did not change Moore’s lifestyle. He wore the same old clothes, continued his hobby of fishing and even kept the same old fishing boat. Moore and his wife, Betty, set up a charity with an endowment of $9.5 billion and a budget of several hundred million dollars a year. They have been supporting a wide range of projects, from research in astronomy and biology to salmon fishing and saving the rainforests of the Amazon.
Moore was awarded several medals for his work on semiconductors. The most prestigious of them was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour of the United States. He received the award from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Finally, a biblical comparison. If Shockley, as has been often suggested, was Moses, who could never enter the Promised Land, Moore was Joshua, who could.
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