The well-known semiconductor technologist and industry pioneer Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, in seclusion at his retirement home on the Pacific island of Hawaii. He devoted himself to his foundation with charitable purposes. In his final years, he stayed away from Northern California's Silicon Valley, whose model dynamic, meritocratic yet strictly egalitarian high-tech culture he helped establish as one of the first chip entrepreneurs.
Moore was 94 years old. Most of his companions and competitors from the early days have long since passed away. However, his principles and visions continue to attract worldwide media attention and continue to stimulate the semiconductor industry to technological and economic heights.
He had his heyday at Intel, the company he and his colleague Robert Noyce founded in 1968 in Santa Clara with a starting capital of 2.3 million dollars. He was its Chairman and CEO from 1979 to 1987. Intel shone in the early 1970s with a complete microprocessor on a single chip, the now legendary 8008, which for many years established Intel's position as the leading manufacturer on the global market.
Moore marks the end of an era of almost mythical proportions. He made his achievements and accomplishments more than 50 years ago. With a doctorate in chemistry from Caltech in Pasadena, he joined a tiny outfit in 1956 that had set itself the goal of developing silicon technology for semiconductor production: the Shockley Labs of legendary transistor co-inventor and Nobel Prize winner William Shockley in Mountain View.
This did not last long: despite his academic merits, Shockley was an erratic and politically controversial figure. After just one year, eight of his highly remunerated experts had had enough. Among them were Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Andy Grove. Denounced by Shockley as the 'Traitorous Eight', they looked for a more communal employer who was more open to their ideas of silicon-based integrated microelectronics. They found him in Sherman Fairchild, whose East Coast company Fairchild Camera and Instrument was involved in aviation equipment.
Moore marked the end of an era of almost mythical proportions.
The company they founded in Palo Alto in 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor, marked the beginning of the narrative of a typically Californian business mentality that was virtually revolutionary in contrast to established large-scale industry: with rapid, predictable technological progress every year and continuous innovation with a new type of microelectronics. Rapid spin-offs by Fairchild managers and engineers with promising product ideas became the hallmark of the young and dynamic chip industry. Especially as the high-tech and space euphoria initiated by US President Kennedy meant that there was no shortage of easy-to-acquire start-up capital.
At Fairchild, Noyce, Grove and Moore energetically drove forward the development of integrated silicon microelectronics for memory modules of the MOS circuit variety. The aim was to fit as many transistors and other switching elements as possible onto the smallest possible chip surface - with the smallest possible structural dimensions. Back then it was a few tens of micrometers, today it is a few nanometers. Moore was concerned with the diffusion process, i.e. the realization of suitable doping profiles in the chip surface to adjust the conductivity for positive or negative charge carriers.
He developed his magnum opus, 'Moore's Law', in 1965 at Fairchild in the form of an article for the specialist magazine 'Electronics'. The basic idea was to reduce the cost of memory chips for consumer applications by continuously miniaturizing them by 30% per bit and per year. Initially, this was to apply for ten years. Moore later revised the period for the associated doubling of the number of transistors per chip to two years. This resulted in the chip scaling down to nano dimensions that still applies today - albeit with compromises in terms of production costs and vertical stacking.
