Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, at his home in Hawaii. He was 94. Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced his death together, and the foundation said he went peacefully, with his family around him.
Moore is best known for a forecast he made in 1965: the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. The prediction held up, and in 1975 he adjusted it to a doubling every two years for the next decade. Chipmakers took it as a target, and it pushed the industry toward electronics that were faster, smaller and cheaper. Moore described his own aim in modest terms. “All I was trying to do was get that message across, that by putting more and more stuff on a chip we were going to make all electronics cheaper,” he said in a 2008 interview.
From Shockley to Intel
Born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929, Moore studied at San Jose State, the University of California at Berkeley and Caltech, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954. He worked first at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, then came back to California in 1956 to join Shockley Semiconductor, the first semiconductor company in what became Silicon Valley.
A year later he left. Moore co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor with Robert Noyce and six other Shockley colleagues, and Fairchild went on to make the first commercially viable integrated circuits. In July 1968, Moore and Noyce started Intel. They hired Andy Grove as the third employee, and the three became known inside the company as the “Intel Trinity.”
Moore ran Intel as executive vice president until 1975, then as president. In 1979 he became chairman and chief executive, and he held both posts until 1987, when he gave up the CEO job and stayed on as chairman. He became chairman emeritus in 1997 and stepped down in 2006.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CEO at the time of Moore’s death, said Moore “defined the technology industry through his insight and vision.” Gelsinger added that Intel intended to pursue Moore’s Law “until the periodic table is exhausted.” Frank Yeary, chairman of Intel’s board, said it was “impossible to imagine the world we live in today” without Moore’s contributions.
Giving and honors
Moore and his wife Betty, whom he married in 1950, formed the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000. It has given more than $5.1 billion to environmental conservation, science and patient care. Harvey Fineberg, the foundation’s president, said Moore “never aspired to be a household name.”
President George H.W. Bush gave Moore the National Medal of Technology in 1990. President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. In 2022, Intel renamed its Ronler Acres campus in Oregon Gordon Moore Park at Ronler Acres.
Betty survives him, along with their sons Kenneth and Steven and four grandchildren.
