Gordon Moore

Gordon Moore is a recurring figure in the semiconductor history threaded through the wiki’s books. In Chip War, he is the author of the famous 1965 article that first graphed the exponential increase in transistor density — the trend Carver Mead later named “Moore’s Law” — and a co-founder and early CEO of Intel alongside Bob Noyce and Andy Grove. The book quotes his 1973 declaration that chipmakers, not counterculture youth, were “the real revolutionaries,” and records his skeptical reaction to Morris Chang’s plan to found TSMC (“Morris, you’ve had a lot of good ideas in your time. This isn’t one of them”). His law recurs as a cost-curve benchmark and, by the book’s end, as a prediction whose physical limits industry luminaries debate. In The Idea Factory, Moore appears earlier in his career, recalling his frustrating time working under William Shockley, whose competitiveness extended even to his relationships with the young physicists he supervised — the backdrop to the “traitorous eight” departure that seeded Fairchild and Silicon Valley.

Context: Gordon Moore (1929–2023) co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel, where he served as CEO and chairman; his 1965 observation about transistor density became Moore’s Law, the defining heuristic of the semiconductor era.

Where this appears

• Chip War — Moore’s Law’s origin and trajectory, his role at Intel, his “revolutionaries” remark, and his dismissal of Chang’s TSMC plan.
• The Idea Factory — Moore’s recollection of working under William Shockley’s intense competitiveness.