Gordon Earl Moore was a physical chemist by training who became one of the founders of the modern semiconductor industry. He was a member of the group that left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, and in 1968 he co-founded Intel with Robert Noyce. At Intel he served as a senior executive and chairman, helping steer the company that would come to dominate the microprocessor business.
Moore’s lasting fame rests on a 1965 article he wrote for the trade journal Electronics, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,” while he was director of research and development at Fairchild. In it he observed that the complexity of integrated circuits for minimum component cost had been doubling at a steady rate and predicted the trend would continue, writing that there was “no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.” That observation became known as Moore’s Law and turned into the industry’s planning roadmap.
In his Computer History Museum oral history, Moore reflected on how the prediction held up far longer than he had expected, discussing what the interview describes as “the unexpected durability of Moore’s Law.” He also recounted the evolution of semiconductor manufacturing from in-house tool building toward a specialized equipment industry, a shift he watched and shaped from inside Fairchild and Intel across the 1960s and beyond.
Moore was a quiet, technically grounded leader rather than a showman, and colleagues credited his judgment about which technologies and markets to pursue. The Intel he helped build rode the very curve he had described, scaling integrated circuits from a few thousand transistors to billions, and along the way the microprocessor he helped commercialize put computing power into nearly every electronic device.
Gordon Moore died in 2023. His name remains attached to the single most cited trend in the history of computing, and the question of when, and how, Moore’s Law would finally end continued to define the industry he helped create.