Moore, Gordon E

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MOORE, GORDON E.

Gordon E. Moore is co-founder of Intel Corp., the world's largest maker of microprocessors and one of the five most profitable manufacturing companies of any business sector. Moore served as CEO of Intel from 1975 until 1987. His prediction, made in the mid-1960s, that computer chip capacity would double every year and a half eventually became known as "Moore's Law." It is viewed by many as the guide-post by which most chip manufacturers of the 1980s and 1990s gauged their success. For that foresight, Moore was awarded a National Medal of Technology from President George Bush in 1990. Having served Intel as chairman since 1979, Moore was appointed chairman emeritus in 1997, a role he retained until May of 2001, when he officially resigned from Intel's board at the age of 72. With an estimated worth of $26 billion, Moore is one of the five wealthiest men in the U.S.

Moore earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. His graduate work, which culminated in a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics, took place at the California Institute of Technology. After finishing his studies in 1955, Moore went to work for Dr. William Shockley—a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the world's first transistor—at a semiconductor upstart in Mountain View, California, known as Shockley Laboratory. After finding it difficult to work with the eccentric researcher, Moore and seven colleagues, including Dr. Robert Noyce, left Shockley Laboratory in 1957 to establish Fairchild Semiconductor, which was owned by parent Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Moore served as head of research, and it was there that he made the projection that became known as Moore's law: a computer chip's power, measured by the number of transistors it could handle, would double every eighteen months. According to Fortune columnist Brian O'Reilly, it was with Noyce serving as vice president and Moore overseeing research that "Fairchild came up with inventions that laid the groundwork for the chip industry, including making chips by etching and printing components in layers, and the 'integrated circuit,' in which components with different functions were etched and connected on the same sliver of silicon."

Although Fairchild Semiconductor eventually became the largest semiconductor company in the world, due in large part to its development of computer chip industry production technology known as the planar process, Moore and Noyce found themselves dissatisfied with the level of financial support they were receiving from their owners. In 1968, they left Fairchild Semiconductor to found their own company, NM Electronics, which was based on a one-page business plan developed by Noyce. NM Electronics was later renamed Intel, from the first syllables of "integrated electronics." Its first products included LSI semiconductor memories, a new high-speed RAM device, and a metal oxide semiconductor chip. With Noyce at the helm, Moore first served Intel as executive vice president.

In 1974, Intel released the 8088, the world's first general purpose microprocessor, which quickly became an industry standard. One year later, Moore was appointed president and CEO of Intel. Sales at that time totaled $135 million. Moore named Andrew S. Grove president in 1979 and also took on the chairmanship of Intel's board. Both Moore and Grove were instrumental in persuading IBM to select the 8088 chip for its new personal computer line in 1980. Together, they also began to discontinue memory chip operations in the mid-1980s, instead focusing Intel on the more profitable microprocessor market. In 1987, Grove took over as CEO from Moore, who remained chairman. By the end of the decade, Intel had grown into the third-largest private semiconductor maker in the world.

Moore continued to serve as chairman of Intel until 1997, when he scaled back his daily responsibilities and took on the role of chairman emeritus. It was at this time that PC growth began to slow and Intel began reducing its emphasis on central processing units in favor of burgeoning networking technology markets such as flash memory chips and cell phone processors. Intel also began offering Internet services, such as World Wide Web hosting. While the Internet revolution had helped to boost the success of the firm Moore co-founded, by prompting hordes of consumers to become PC owners, it also spawned the technology that eventually allowed those same consumers to access the Internet without their PCs. In the late 1990s, just as Moore's career at Intel began to wind down, the firm began to gear up, hoping to reinvent itself as a networking technology and Internet services powerhouse.