Gordon Moore

File:Gordon-moore.jpg

Gordon Moore

Biography

Gordon Earle Moore (3 January 1929 – 24 March 2023) was an American chemist, engineer and businessman, co-founder of Intel Corporation and author of the observation that became Moore's Law. Born in San Francisco and raised in Pescadero, California, he took a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Berkeley and a doctorate in chemistry and physics at Caltech in 1954.

He joined William Shockley's Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956 and left the following year as one of the "traitorous eight" who founded Fairchild Semiconductor — the departure generally credited with starting the Silicon Valley pattern of engineers leaving to found competitors. In 1968 he and Robert Noyce left Fairchild to found Intel, where Moore served as executive vice president, president, chief executive and chairman. With his wife Betty he established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000, which has funded environmental conservation, scientific research and the Thirty Meter Telescope.

Moore's Law

In an article for the trade magazine Electronics on 19 April 1965, titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits," Moore plotted the number of components per integrated circuit against time — from a handful of data points covering 1959 to 1965 — and observed that the number giving the lowest cost per component had roughly doubled each year. He projected the trend forward a decade, to about 65,000 components on a chip by 1975. In 1975 he revised the doubling period to roughly two years.

Several things about the original paper are consistently misremembered. It is a short trade-press piece, not a scientific paper. It is an economic observation about cost per component, not a claim about speed or performance. It was based on five data points. And Moore himself repeatedly described it as an extrapolation rather than a law, and predicted its end many times over the following decades.

The same article contains predictions that are more interesting than the curve: home computers, automatic controls for automobiles, and "personal portable communications equipment."

Law or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The most substantial thing to say about Moore's Law is that it stopped being a description and became a target. Once the semiconductor industry adopted the doubling schedule as a planning horizon — coordinating capital investment, research programmes, equipment development and product roadmaps across many firms against it — the curve was being produced by the expectation rather than merely observed. Historians of technology generally treat it as the clearest available case of a technological trajectory sustained by social coordination.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Moore's Law is the assumption underneath most of the twentieth century's technological optimism, and it is worth seeing as a contingent industrial arrangement rather than a physical fact. It is also the engine of future runoff: a device is not superseded because it stopped working but because the schedule said something better would exist, and the schedule was kept. Devices depreciate on a curve that a trade magazine article helped set.

Related Reading

• Future Runoff
• Hand Me Up Technology
• Materials
• Thorstein Veblen