Gordon Moore

His father kept the peace in San Mateo County, first as a constable and later as undersheriff, and when Gordon started school in 1935 the faculty wrote him down as an introvert. The family moved to Redwood City in 1939. The Christmas after that a chemistry set arrived and settled what he would be. He went from Sequoia High to San José State, transferred to Berkeley for a chemistry degree in 1950, and took a Caltech doctorate in 1954 on the infrared spectra of nitrous acid and the chloramines, then did postdoctoral work at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He was a physical chemist with no interest in commerce when William Shockley called him to Palo Alto.

Shockley hired him and then drove off eight of his own people, Moore among them, in 1957. Sherman Fairchild put up the money, and Fairchild Semiconductor became the ancestor of most of Silicon Valley. Moore was running its research when Electronics magazine asked him, in the spring of 1965, what the components business would look like in ten years. He counted: the number of components on a dense integrated circuit had been doubling roughly every year, and he wrote that it would keep doubling. In 1975 he revised the interval to two years. Carver Mead attached his name to it. In July 1968 he and Robert Noyce walked out again to start what became Intel, where Moore was president, then chairman and chief executive from 1979 to 1987, then chairman until 1997. The forecast held for half a century.

The law was never a law. What Moore did in 1965 was draw a line through a handful of data points for a trade magazine and revise it ten years later when the line bent. What made it durable is that the industry adopted it as a schedule: chip makers set research budgets and factory construction against Moore's curve, so the curve kept being met, and it stopped describing what was happening and started dictating it. Moore said as much himself, and spent decades telling audiences that no exponential runs forever. He was also clear about where his industry came from. It began with eight men walking out on their employer carrying what they knew, an act Shockley took as betrayal and everyone since has treated as a founding.

He died at 94 in March 2023, at his house in Waimea on the island of Hawaii, worth about seven billion dollars. Most had already gone into the foundation he and Betty endowed with five billion in 2000, which has paid for conservation across the Amazon basin, 600 million dollars to Caltech, and, in 2007, 200 million toward a 30-metre telescope on Mauna Kea, on the same island where he was living. That telescope does not exist. Native Hawaiian protest stopped construction in 2015, a federal review in December 2024 called site access an existential problem, the National Science Foundation dropped the project in June 2025, and Spain has offered 400 million euros to move it to the Canary Islands.

Gordon Moore's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fairchild Semiconductor company
  Founded by the eight who walked out on Shockley 1957
• Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits article
  Electronics magazine, April 19 — the article that became Moore's law 1965
• Intel Corporation company
  Founded with Robert Noyce as NM Electronics 1968
• Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics article
  The revision that slowed the doubling to every two years 1975
• Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation company
  Endowed with about five billion dollars for conservation and science 2000

• 1940 aged ~11 A chemistry set arrives for Christmas and decides his career
• 1950 aged ~21 Marries Betty Whitaker and takes a chemistry degree at Berkeley They had met at a student government conference at Asilomar in 1947.
• 1954 aged ~25 Takes a Caltech doctorate on the infrared spectra of nitrous acid
• 1957 aged ~28 Walks out on William Shockley with seven others Sherman Fairchild backed them and Fairchild Semiconductor followed.
• April 19, 1965 aged 36 Publishes the ten-year forecast that becomes Moore's law Components on a dense chip had been doubling about every year.
• July 1968 aged 39 Founds NM Electronics with Robert Noyce It became Intel.
• 1975 aged ~46 Slows his own forecast to a doubling every two years
• 2000 aged ~71 Endows the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with five billion dollars
• March 24, 2023 aged 94 Dies at his home in Waimea, Hawaii, at 94

• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. co-founded Intel with
• William Shockley 1910–1989
  Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age. walked out on
• Andy Grove 1936–2016
  Intel leader who helped make microprocessors central to computing and shaped Silicon Valley management culture. handed Intel to
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. invented the circuit his forecast counted
• Steve Jobs 1955–2011
  Co-founder of Apple who revolutionized personal computing, music, and mobile communications. later bought his processors