Gordon Moore was born in San Francisco, California, in 1929. He holds a BS (1950) in chemistry from UC Berkeley and a PhD (1954) in chemistry and physics from Caltech.
Moore is a key figure in the development of semiconductor electronics, making major contributions to the origin and perfection of the integrated circuit (IC) as a viable technology. With Robert Noyce and others, he founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in 1957, where he implemented Noyce's concepts to create “wireless clusters” of transistors, the basic idea of the IC, or “chip.”
As head of R&D at Fairchild, in 1965 he published a widely read article that first proposed what would become known as “Moore's Law,” in which he predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every year. This observation has proven to be basically correct for more than four decades.
In 1968, Moore cofounded Intel Corporation with Robert Noyce. Intel has become a world leader in the design and manufacturing of semiconductors and is the largest semiconductor company in the world. Among other awards, Moore holds the IEEE Medal of Honor (2008) and the US National Medal of Technology (1990).
