Moore, Gordon Earle

Moore, Gordon Earle, 1929– American engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, b. San Francisco, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1954. He joined (1956) Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, where he worked with William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor. In 1957 Moore was one of several cofounders of Fairchild Semiconductor, a transistor and integrated circuit manufacturer. He and Robert Noyce left Fairchild to become founders of (1968) Intel Corp., the semiconductor chips manufacturer; and Moore served as Intel's executive vice president (1968–75), president and CEO (1975–79), chairman and CEO (1979–87), and chairman (1987–97). In 1965 he formulated what was later dubbed Moore's Law, predicting that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every 18 months. In 1975 he revised his observation of semiconductor industry manufacturing trends to project a doubling every two years.

See biography by A. Thackray et al. (2015).

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