Gordon Moore, a semiconductor industry pioneer whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, died Friday at the age of 94.
Moore died surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii, according to Intel and Moore family’s philanthropic foundation.
Moore was the rolled-up-sleeves engineer in a triumvirate of technology luminaries who eventually put “Intel Inside” processors in more than 80% of the world’s personal computers, co-founding Intel in 1968.
He went to work at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory where he met future Intel cofounder Robert Noyce. Part of the “traitorous eight,” they departed in 1957 to launch Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 1968, Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to start the memory chip company that would soon be named Intel, an abbreviation of Integrated Electronics. Moore and Noyce’s first hire was another Fairchild colleague, Andy Grove, who would lead Intel through much of its explosive growth in the 1980s and 1990s.
