San Francisco (Reportase One) – Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel Corp and a pioneer in the semiconductor industry with his famous “Moore’s Law”, died Friday at the age of 94.
Intel and the Moore family’s charitable foundation said he died while with family at his home in Hawaii.
Moore co-launched Intel in 1968. He was one of three technology luminaries who managed to place “Intel Inside” processors in more than 80 percent of personal computers (PCs) worldwide.
In an article he wrote in 1965, Moore said that thanks to advances in technology, the number of transistors on a microchip had increased by about twofold per year since the integrated circuit (IC) was invented a few years earlier.
His prediction that the trend would continue became known as “Moore’s Law”, which was later changed to biannual.
The law prompted Intel and rival chipmakers to focus on aggressive research and development to ensure the rule of thumb became a reality.
“Integrated circuits will work wonders such as home computers – or at least, terminals connected to central computers – for auto-control of cars, and personal portable communications devices,” Moore wrote in the article, two decades before the PC revolution and more than 40 years before Apple. launch iPhone.
After Moore’s article, chips became more efficient, cheaper and their capabilities increased exponentially.
That advance fueled much of the world’s technological advances over the next half century, spawning not only the PC, but also Internet and technology giants in Silicon Valley such as Apple, Facebook, and Google.
“It’s a joy to be in the right place at the right time,” Moore said in an interview around 2005.
He admits that he was very lucky to be able to enter the semiconductor industry during its early growth.
“And I had the opportunity to grow, from the time we couldn’t build a single silicon transistor to the time we put 1.7 billion transistors on a single chip! It’s been a phenomenal journey,” he said.
In recent years, Intel’s competitors such as Nvidia Corp. have argued that Moore’s Law no longer applies because the rate of progress in chip manufacturing has slowed.
But despite the manufacturing bottlenecks that have caused Intel to lose market share in recent years, current CEO Pat Gelsinger says he believes Moore’s Law still applies.
Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), the world’s largest chip maker, said Moore was a great and respected friend for more than six decades.
“With Gordon gone, nearly all of my colleagues from the first generation of semiconductor days are gone,” Chang said in a statement from TSMC.
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Accidental Entrepreneur
Despite predicting the development of the PC, Moore told Forbes magazine that he didn’t have his own personal computer until the late 1980s.
The San Francisco-born man earned his PhD in chemistry and physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1954.
He later worked at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and met Robert Noyce, who would later co-found Intel. They left the lab in 1957 to launch Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 1968, Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to start the memory chip company that was later named Intel, short for Integrated Electronics.
Intel’s first recruit was their colleague at Fairchild, Andy Grove, who led Intel to grow explosively in the 1980s and 1990s.
Moore described himself to Fortune as an “accident entrepreneur,” who had no burning desire to start a company, but he, Noyce, and Grove formed a strong partnership.
Although Noyce had theories about how to solve chip engineering problems, Moore was a man who spent countless hours tinkering with transistors and perfecting Noyce’s many and sometimes obscure ideas.
Meanwhile, Grove served as Intel’s operations and management specialist.
Moore’s outstanding talent inspired the engineers who worked for him. Under his and Noyce’s leadership, Intel invented the microprocessor which paved the way for the PC revolution.
Moore became executive president of Intel until 1975, although he and CEO Noyce considered themselves equals. From 1979-1987, Moore served as chairman and CEO, and until 1997 he remained chairman.
Forbes magazine in 2023 estimates his net worth at 7.2 billion US dollars (about Rp. 113.7 trillion).
Moore is a seasoned angler. In 2000 he and his wife, Betty, founded an environmental foundation that undertook projects such as protecting the Amazon River basin and salmon streams in the US, Canada, and Russia.
The foundation was funded by Moore’s donation of $5 billion in Intel stock.
He also donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma mater, the California Institute of Technology, and supports a project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
Moore received the Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian award, from President George W. Bush in 2002.
He and his wife have two children.
Source: Reuters
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Translator: Anton Santoso
Editor: Yuni Arisandy Sinaga
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