Gordon Earle Moore / 1929–2023 / California, USA / Chemist, Applied Physicist, Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation and Intel Corporation
Education
The technology at the leading edge changes so rapidly that you have to keep current after you get out of school. I think probably the most important thing is having good fundamentals.
Interview with Laura Schmitt, Ingenuity magazine, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 5(2), May, 2000.
Failure
With engineering, I view this year’s failure as next year’s opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.
Interview with Laura Schmitt, Ingenuity magazine, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 5(2), May, 2000.
Fairchild
Fairchild did a lot of pioneering work. The company was really in the right place at the right time. In the first place, we pursued this idea of a diffused silicon transistor that [William] Shockley had been initially going to do. It was something that had been made in the laboratory at Bell Labs but was not a commercial device at all. We were the first ones to bring to the market what’s known as a “mesa” transistor and it was a silicon mesa transistor at that time. It was quite a successful device on the scale that we were working at least, but that was only the first of several devices.
That was the first silicon transistor that was built by the batch process—where you made a lot of them on a wafer and then cut them up individually. And it was the first device in manufacturing that used photolithography to produce the structures. So these were fairly important early developments.
Interview with Rob Walker, “Silicon Genesis: Oral Histories of Semiconductor Industry Pioneers,” Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History, Stanford University, March 3, 1995.
Moore’s Law
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. . . . Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.
“Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,” Electronics, 38(8): 114–117, April 19, 1965.
I had no idea this was going to be an accurate prediction, but amazingly enough instead of 10 [years] doubling, we got nine over the 10 years, but still followed pretty well along the curve.
Press release, “Computer History Museum Presents: The 40th Anniversary of Moore’s Law with Gordon Moore and Carver Mead,” Computer History Museum, computerhistory.org, September 15, 2005.
I used to give talks about how other industries might have progressed. You know, had the auto industry made progress at the same rate [as silicon microelectronics], you would have gotten a million miles per gallon of fuel, had cars that could go several hundred thousand miles an hour. It’d be more expensive to park [one] downtown for the night than to buy a new Rolls-Royce.
Interview with Rachel Courtland, “Gordon Moore: The Man Whose Name Means Progress,” IEEE Spectrum, spectrum.ieee.com, March 30, 2015.
By making things smaller, everything gets better at the same time. The transistors get faster. The reliability goes up. The cost goes down. It’s a unique violation of Murphy’s Law.
Video interview, “Our Stories—Gordon Moore about Moore’s Law,” ASML, youtube.com, December 18, 2014.
So, I took this doubling every year and extrapolated it ten years, from 1965 to 1975, from 60 components to 60,000 components on a chip—a pretty wild extrapolation. And It turned out to be ridiculously accurate. . . . One of my colleagues called this “Moore’s Law.” Rather than just being something that chronicles the progress of the industry, it kind of became something that drove the progress of the industry.
Video interview, “Our Stories—Gordon Moore about Moore’s Law,” ASML, youtube.com, December 18, 2014.
A: . . . Now, I modified that in 1975, suggesting it was going to slow down to more like a doubling every two years and I was a little bit too pessimistic then—we’ve actually beat that. It doubles something between 18 months and two years.
Q: Yes, and when will it approach the number of atoms in the universe?
[Laughter.]
A: I haven’t extrapolated it that far. [Laughter.] That’s one thing: any exponential like that predicts a disaster if you extrapolate it far enough.
Interview with Rob Walker, “Silicon Genesis: Oral Histories of Semiconductor Industry Pioneers,” Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History, Stanford University, March 3, 1995.
Q: You’ve predicted the end of Moore’s Law several times in the past. How long do you think it will continue?
A: Well, I have never quite predicted the end of it. I’ve said I could never see more than the next couple of [chip] generations, and after that it looked like [we’d] hit some kind of wall. But those walls keep receding. I’m amazed at how creative the engineers have been in finding ways around what we thought were going to be pretty hard stops. Now we’re getting to the point where it’s more and more difficult, and some of the laws are quite fundamental. . . . the finite velocity of light and the atomic nature of materials. . . . We’re very close to the atomic limitation now. We take advantage of all the speed we can get, but the velocity of light limits performance. These are fundamentals I don’t see how we [will] ever get around. And in the next couple of generations, we’re right up against them.
Interview with Rachel Courtland, “Gordon Moore: The Man Whose Name Means Progress,” IEEE Spectrum, spectrum.ieee.com, March 30, 2015.
Risk-Taking
. . . when you’re a startup company you have to bet the company on a lot of the programs you do. When you get bigger you only want to bet half the company if you can do that. You don’t want to do something that if it doesn’t work, will put you out of business completely.
On the other hand, you gotta keep reaching. If everything you do works, you’re probably not trying hard enough.
Interview with Rob Walker, “Silicon Genesis: Oral Histories of Semiconductor Industry Pioneers,” Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History, Stanford University, March 3, 1995.
Technological Progress
Some things may have been tried before their time, but if these things don’t violate the laws of physics they are likely to prove possible the next time around. Engineering is a series of failures with an occasional success. At least the kind where you are really looking at new technology. You tend to try things. You try things that are extrapolations of what has happened before. A lot of them don’t work. Occasionally, you hit one that does. That’s the way we make progress. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly. But, I’ve known technical people who are very competent but who would avoid doing a critical experiment. They would kind of work around the problem and do the things where the results were relatively straightforward, but they hated to do that experiment that might tell if their whole approach was right or wrong. And these people were relatively nonproductive. Then I’ve known other people who weren’t perhaps as bright as the ones that worked around the problem who jumped right at the heart of the matter. They turn out to be the most productive. So my single piece of advice is don’t delay making the critical test. That’s the one that will tell you if you are right or wrong and where to go next.
Interview with Laura Schmitt, Ingenuity magazine, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 5(2), May, 2000.
Q: What happens then, once you’ve reached those [fundamental physical] limits?
A: Well, things change when we get to that point. No longer can we depend on making things smaller and higher density. But we’ll be able to make several billion transistors on an integrated circuit at that time. And the room this allows for creativity is phenomenal.
Interview with Rachel Courtland, “Gordon Moore: The Man Whose Name Means Progress,” IEEE Spectrum, spectrum.ieee.com, March 30, 2015.