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 ShockleyShockley, William Bradford,
1910–89, American physicist, b. London. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). After directing antisubmarine research for the U.S.
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, the co-inventor of the transistortransistor,
three-terminal, solid-state electronic device used for amplification and switching. It is the solid-state analog to the triode electron tube; the transistor has replaced the electron tube for virtually all common applications.
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. In 1957 Moore was one of several cofounders of Fairchild Semiconductor, a transistor and integrated circuit manufacturer. He and Robert NoyceNoyce, Robert Norton
, 1927–90, American engineer, inventor, and entrepeneur, b. Burlington, Iowa.; grad. Grinnell College (B.A., 1949), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1953).
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 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 LawMoore's Law,
a projection of semiconductor manufacturing trends made by Gordon E. Moore, cofounder of the Intel Corp., in a 1965 magazine article. He observed that the number of transistors per square inch on a microprocessor chip had doubled each year since the integrated
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, 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.

Bibliography

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