Engineer-entrepreneur Gordon Moore, co-founder of semiconductor manufacturer Intel, died Friday, March 24, at the age of 94, according to his former company, of which he was CEO from 1979 to 1987. The American is also credited with having given his name to a theory on the technological evolution of computer chips.
In 1968, this doctor of chemistry created NM Electronics in collaboration with physicist Robert Noyce, nicknamed the “mayor of Silicon Valley”. A few months later, the two men bought the Intel name for 15,000 dollars.
In 1971, Intel markets the first microprocessor, the equivalent of a computer on a chip, a programmable processor that contains several thousand transistors, a revolution. Intel is now the largest semiconductor maker in the United States and the third largest in the world by revenue, behind South Korea’s Samsung and Taiwan’s TSMC.
“The world has lost a giant in Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Silicon Valley and a true visionary, who paved the way for the technological revolution,” tweeted Apple CEO Tim Cook.
A theory that will soon no longer apply
In 1965, while employed at another company, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gordon Moore predicted, in an article published by Electronics magazine, that the density of transistors in microprocessors would double every year. He will modify his projection in 1975, in an equally empirical way, to retain a doubling every two years. Another microchip pioneer, Carver Mead, calls this prophecy “Moore’s Law”.
The evolution of microprocessor capabilities has followed Moore’s Law for decades, increasing the performance of electronics and computing while driving down its costs. According to several estimates, the cost of a transistor has been reduced by several hundred million since the beginning of the 1960s.
This evolution has made it possible to democratize computing and electronics, first with personal computers, then various devices, up to the mobile phone. Specialists predict that Moore’s law will soon no longer apply due to physical limits to the integration of transistors on a microprocessor.
