Moore, Gordon Earle
Gordon Earle Moore, 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 Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor. In 1957 Moore was one of several cofounders of Fairchild Semiconductor, a transistor and integrated circuit manufacturer. He and Robert Noyce 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 is is known as Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every year; in 1975 he revised his observation of semiconductor industry trends to doubling every two years.