Spotlight on Gordon Moore

his contributions to technology. Along the way, we'll learn why he was dubbed traitorous by a former employer, along with seven of his co workers. We'll talk a bit about Moore's law and what that originally meant versus how we typically interpret it today, and of course we'll chat a bit about a tiny little company he co found called Intel. Gordon Moore was born on January third, nineteen twenty nine.

That would turn out to be a pretty darn eventful year, because in August the world would enter the Great Depression, which would affect the economy for a full decade. Fortunately for the Moore family, they were not you know, Wall

Street investors. They didn't lose their shirts in the Great Depression. Now, his father was a deputy sheriff of a little town called Pescadero, which was on the coast of California, so just a little bit south of San Francisco, and his mother ran a general store in town, so his family was not as directly hit by the depression as many others were. Now. Early on, Gordon Moore said that his

ambition was to become a teacher. He was very interested in science, specifically in chemistry, and he enrolled in San Jose State College, and that's where he would meet his future wife, Betty Whittaker. The two would be married for more than seventy years. They actually got married in nineteen fifty. That was the same year that Moore had graduated with his undergrad degree. He had transferred to the University of California, Berkeley and completed his undergrad degree there, and he earned

his degree in chemistry. He then continued his studies at cal Tech. He had postgraduate work and Moore would earn a doctorate, also in chemistry. Rather than pursue a career in teaching, he applied for a position at Dow Chemical. However, accloid Moore during a psychological evaluation for the part of the hiring process, a Dow representative determined that More didn't

have what it takes to be a manager. They said that his technical skills were suitable, that he had strong skills in the field of science, but that he would not make a good manager. Considering what would happen later in Moore's life, this assessment should go down as one

of the dumbest ones in tech history. But hey, once upon a time I worked for consultants who would do things like leadership assessments, and based upon the stuff that I was reading, my own personal opinion is a lot of those assessments are based on who he Again, that's my own personal opinion, and I could be totally wrong about that. I just got very jaded about it. Anyway, back to the story. More needed a gig, So then he took a position at Johns Hopkins University. But this

is in Baltimore. He joined their applied physics Laboratory. But you know, Baltimore is in Maryland. That's on the opposite side of the United States from California. So he was about as far away as he could get from his home while still being in the United States. And Moore's extended family still lived out in California, so he didn't

really like working on the East Coast. So even though he had steady work, he kept looking for opportunities that would let him move back across the United States to the West Coast, and one such opportunity arose at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Now this lab had Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller as co founders. Now those names might not mean anything to you, but Edward Teller in particular is also sometimes referred to as the father of the hydrogen bomb.

Though he didn't He didn't like that. He was a theoretical physicist and was notoriously difficult to work with. He also earned a bad and arguably unjustified reputation after testifying in a hear to determine whether or not Robert Oppenheimer should have his security clearance revoked. Teller was of the opinion that it should, and ultimately it was. Anyway, episode is not about Edward Teller. I will have to do another one about Teller in the future. I think I've

talked about him in past episodes. I'm certain I have, and things like episodes about the Manhattan Project. But the Livermore Lab was known primarily for work involving the research and development of nuclear weapons. So Gordon Moore had this opportunity to go and work for the Livermore Lab, and he thought about this and ultimately decided that he was not keen on the idea of working in the field

of nuclear weapons research and development. And you know, even though he had the skills in chemistry and he had a good understanding of physics, he just didn't feel right about dedicating his expertise toward making things go boom. But nineteen fifty six he got a different opportunity with a brand new startup division a company that was called Shockley Semiconductor. This was a division of another company called Beckman Instruments Incorporated.

So the founder of the parent company, Arnold O. Beckman, was a chemist and inventor who saw a potential in a brand new technology, one that was developed under the management of William Shockley when he was working at Bell Labs. This would be in the very late nineteen forties. Now I've talked about William Shockley in old episodes of tech Stuff. He led a solid state physics group in Bell Labs, and under his watch that lab produced the world's first transistor.

It is impossible for me to overstate how important the transistor is, how important it was, and how important it continues to be. It really is the basis for all of electronics moving forward from that point. So to call it a pivotal moment is being, you know, kind of

is kind of downplaying it. Really, Transistors can do all sorts of stuff that's useful in circuits, but like the basic ones, or things like being a way to direct electricity so that it flows along a specific path, or to act as a switch to stop electricity from passing through certain places, to being able to amplify a weak signal into a stronger signal. Transistors would replace things that

were much larger components like vacuum tubes. So this meant that the transistor would make it possible to miniaturize components and create integrated electronics. So this is what allowed for the era of miniaturization. When you hear things like a transistor radio that was based upon this technology, and it meant that a radio no longer had to be like a piece of furniture that was large and had to sit either on top of a table or heck, it might have been its own cabinet in the old radio days,

to something that you could fit in your pocket. That would be what transistors would make possible, and it would transform the technological world. So William Shockley his team developed the very first transistor, and his research served as sort of the foundation for this work. But it was actually two of his lab text two of his employees who did the actual building. It was John Bardeen and Walter Bretagne, two of Shockley's team who created the first working transistor.

There was a lot of animosity between Shockley and his team, with disagreements regarding who should get credit for the invention and that kind of thing. Shockley was always upset whenever there were patents being filed for technologies that came out of his lab that didn't have his name on it, and then his team members would often bristle at that saying like, yeah, but you didn't do it, so your

name shouldn't be on it. And it just turned out that Shockley, like Edward Teller, was also notoriously difficult to work with anyway. Putting aside his managerial limitations, Shockley had received some support from Beckman to create Shockley Semiconductor Beckman recognized that the semiconductor industry was going to be the next really big thing, and he wanted to make sure that he had a handle on it. So he felt that it was important to have Shockley be able to

establish his own company. Although he had some reservations about Shockley's ability to lead people, it turns out those reservations were well founded. One thing Shockley did have, though, was a really good eye for talent. He started to recruit very bright prospects. Folks fresh out of postgraduate studies who were on the cutting edge of scientific research were among the top candidates. One person he had his zion was

Gordon Moore. Gordon Moore was someone that Shockley approached during a meeting of the American Physical Society, so he actually recruited more in person. In other cases, he reached out to various West Coast post graduates, and in a few cases he actually got attention by running advertising in the Northeast because at the time, the semiconductor transistor world was sort of coalescing in the New York area. That's where Bell Labs was located. So that was a challenge because

Shockley was locating his lab on the West coast. So to attract more talent, he actually ran essentially classified ads in newspapers in the Northeast to attract people. And so this initial group came together to become the first team at Shockley Semiconductor. All right, I've got more to say about what happened over at Shockley and how Moore's career would go from there. But before we get to that,

let's take a quick break. Okay, So Gordon Moore joins a team along with a bunch of other notable people in technology over at Shockley Semiconductor, and it would not take long for things to go sour. More and his co workers faced very tough conditions. They didn't always agree with each other. For one thing, they had different ideas of what the best approach was toward developing semiconductors and transistors, so there was some disagreement even within their community of coworkers.

But more than that, William Shockley was an aggressive, autocratic, and paranoid employer. I get the sense that he felt the need to be the smartest person in the room. But then he also gathered together talent for his pledgling company that consisted of some of the brightest minds and science and engineering of the day. He reportedly distrusted the work that his team created and would send the output to contexts that he still had at Bell Labs to

double check their work. Which if you are, you know, like a pre eminent researcher in your field, you are going to be insulted if your employer says, well, let me just send this off to a competitor to double check your numbers. Shockley also insisted on testing each person with psychological analysis before hiring them on which you know, and Moore had already gone through when he had applied

for dal Chemical. William Shockley also allegedly planned to force his entire team to submit to a lie detector test at one point, but because everyone objected to it, he let it drop. And I know that I talk a lot about demanding bosses in tech, you know, folks like Tim Cook or Elon Musk, who would demand that employees returned to the office. But honestly, when you look at what William Shockley did, they ain't got nothing on him.

So anyway, Gordon Moore had joined Shockley Semiconductor in nineteen fifty six. By mid nineteen fifty seven, things had approached a point where they were intolerable. So more, with the support of several of his compatriots, met with Arnold Beckman, the founder of the parent company that Shockley Semiconductor was under, and he said, Hey, either Shockley goes or we go.

We cannot continue this. You need to remove Shockley from being in a management position, put someone who has actual management experience in his role, and I don't know, give Shockley like a really cushy professor position at some university. But Beckman declined to acquiesce to this request, and so in September nineteen fifty seven, Gordon Moore and seven others who were important people with Shockley Semiconductor left and founded a new company with the help of a wealthy entrepreneur

named Sherman Fairchild. Fairchild already had a couple of companies to his name, including a camera company that worked closely with the military, and so they created a division called Fairchild Semiconductor. These eight defectors from Shockley Semiconductor became known as the Traitorous Eight, though I don't know if Shockley

himself ever referred to them as the Traitors Eight. Shockley would go on to alienate a lot more people and sadly adopted increasingly extremist views as he got older, including an interest in eugenics. But we'll leave him behind because Gord Moorscher did. Now, if everyone within the eight were on good terms with each other and were in agreement with what the best approach to semiconductors and integrated circuits was, our story would likely pretty much stay with Fairchild Semiconductor

from here on out. But they didn't. There were disagreements. There were different teams that were focused on different pathways toward a goal, pathways that were not compatible with one another, and so there were disagreements between the different teams about which design or methodology was the best one to pursue, which one was going to create the superior product, and things got pretty heated. They did have some unifying beliefs.

There were things that the whole team agreed upon, and one of those was that silicon was going to be the semiconductor material of the future. So at the time, most research labs were working with germanium as the material

for semiconductors. But silicon is really very cheap. It is like essentially sand, It's plentiful, it is not expensive, and the group argued that it would allow for cheaper electronics once you reached a point where the integrated circus you were building were reliable and efficient, which would require a

lot of R and D to get there. But they saw silicon as being the most promising of the materials and something that would ultimately be scalable, that you would be able to build much more complicated electronics using silicon because of, you know, the fact that it's cheap and plentiful and it wouldn't be holding you back. So they were talking about a future where electronics would become so inexpensive that it would actually be less costly to just go out and buy a new whatever it was, rather

than to have your broken one repaired. World's turn on such thoughts. Fairchild Semiconductor began producing transistors and found customers in the form of other big companies like IBM, so Fairchild was not selling stuff straight to consumers. You wouldn't go into your store and buy a fair Child Semiconductor product.

Instead other companies that would use these components to build out their products, which you might possibly buy, although IBM wasn't selling directly to consumers at that time either, so the computer systems they were designing were for big companies or the military. In fact, one of the earliest uses for Fairchild semiconductors was in a computer system that was for a military bomber. One of Gordon Moore's co workers

and also someone with whom Moore would clash, was Jean Hoernie. Now, Jean developed a new process for transistor manufacturing that improved reliability and performance, and all Gordy and Jean were leading to different groups that we're working on different approaches to transistors, and this would cause a bit of a divide, especially since Gordon Moore had the ear of Robert Noyce, who was kind of seen as a leader within the group.

So Moore was able to get his projects moved forward, sometimes at the expense or at least perceived to be at the expense of others like Jean hoo Ernie, and so there was tension within the group. By nineteen sixty, the Fairchild team oversaw the development of a silicon wafer containing a four transistor circuit on it. This was a

huge deal. I mean, four transistors is nothing today, all right, We're talking about we're in an era where billions of components are on a microprocessor we have far far outstripped the capabilities of the nineteen sixty four transistor circuit, but at the time it was truly a remarkable achievement. It was the first integrated circuit that used silicon as the semiconductor material. So fair Child was not the first company to develop an integrated circuit, because Texas Instruments had already

done it. Jack Kilby had created an integrated circuit, but that one used germanium as the semiconductor material, and he had done that back in nineteen fifty eight. The fair Child integrated circuit was the first to use silicon, and unlike germanium, silicon was much more cheap and plentiful and thus scalable. It made integrated circuits a viable technology for all sorts of applications, including cheap electronics. So again, this was one of those developed ments that would really shape

the way technology would evolve from that point forward. By early nineteen sixty one, the Traitorous eight had split into two groups of four because four of the eight would leave Fairchild Semiconductor and join a different company called Amelco, but Gordon Moore stayed with Fairchild along with Robert Noise, and they continued to work on integrated circuits at Fairchild Semiconductor.

In nineteen sixty five, Gordon More submitted an article to the journal Electronics that would forever be associated with him. That article has the title Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, but the observation More made in that article would later be dubbed by Carver Mead of cal Tech as Moore's Law. I'll explain more about Moore's law when we come back from this quick break. Okay, So if you read Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, which you can do. The

article is freely available on the internet. You can just search for that title or search Gordon More article. They'll find lots of links to it. Moore has a couple of bangers right out of the gate. I mean, you might not think of them as that exciting, but I

think they were incredibly prescient. So the opening statement says, quote, with unit cost falling as the number of components per circuit rises by nineteen seventy five, economics may dictate squeezing as many as sixty five thousand components on a single silicon chip end quote. He also says at the beginning of the article quote the future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself end quote. And yeah, these were really good observations. So what the heck is this

article all about. It's mostly covering how economics push companies to develop increasingly smaller components for integrated circuits and how those circuits power new kinds of electronics, and this perpetuates the need to pour more money into developing ways to cram even more components onto an inch of silicon wafer like a square inch of silicon wafer. So, in other words, it's the cycle of being able to create more powerful chips, which then drives down the cost per component on the chip.

The chips themselves might get more expensive, but the components get less expensive the actual individual components on the chip do and that this in turn creates the ability for companies to make cheaper electronics, which goes onto fuel the development cycle. So again, this cyclical pattern that allows for the progression of of chip development. So balancing this out is the scale of production and the ability to integrate

these circuits into different products. So it almost becomes like a you can make it up in volume, because even though the component price might go down. The fact that you're putting more components on a chip means the individual chip might get more expensive to make. So yeah, like per component, you're spending less, but then you're cramming way

more components on a chip, so you spend more. And like I said, you have to find that sweet spot, that spot where the cost of manufacturing makes sense and that you're able to achieve profit by integrating that circuit into whatever electronic product you're pushing out there. Then more makes another observation that quote the complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor

of two per year end quote. So here he's talking about how using the most cost effective means of producing integrated circuits, you would expect to see circuit complexity double every year, at least over the short term. And he does acknowledge that this should change a little bit over time, but that within ten years time from the publication of the article quote, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum costs will be sixty five thousand end quote.

So again he's saying that based upon what we're seeing right now, we should see the number of components on a square inch of silicon chip double every year. Eventually it would be every two years. So the entire article,

like I said's available online. You can read the whole thing, and it does touch on some other elements besides the economic factors that drive the development in the first place, including stuff like dealing with the heat that's generated by an integrated circuit that has tens of thousands of components that are all crammed next to each other. But later on people would reframe More's observation a bit and they started to look at it from a slightly different angle.

So instead of talking about the economic factors that would allow for this to happen and ultimately would result in cheaper electronics, they saw it as every two years, companies double the number of components. Typically we're talking about transistors that they can fit on a silicon wafer. Later on, people would reframe it even more and say that essentially this means that computer companies double the processing power or

in some cases, processing speed every two years. So you could say that if you order to buy a brand new computer today, that brand new computer would be twice as powerful as a similar model that you had purchased two years earlier. Now this also depends upon how you define powerful, So there's there's a lot of wiggle room for a law. Most laws don't allow for that much wiggle room, but Moore's law does. But again, it's because this all stems from an observation about the economics of

producing semiconductor chips. It has since been seen as a benchmark that semiconductor companies aim to maintain. There's this pressure to keep up with the demands or expectations that have been set by Moore's law. Now everyone pretty much acknowledges that this trend is not infinitely sustainable, and that we're already bumping up against the physical limits of what we can do with traditional microchip architecture. But there is still this compulsion to keep the spirit of Moore's law going.

No one wants to be the one to say, all right, well, we had a good run. From here on out, we're not going to see progress at that same rate. It will still see progress, but it's going to slow down. Maybe it'll be every four or five years instead of every two. Now I'm fairly sure that at the time Gordon Moore had no idea how widely known his observation would become or the incredible impact it would have on the tech sector. But we're not finished with Gordon Moore yet.

So nineteen sixty five, he publishes this article. At that time, he was still hard at work at Fairchild semi Conductor, but things were a bit rocky over there. For a few years, Fairchild was performing pretty well in the tech sector because it didn't have that many competitors in the space, but as the late nineteen sixties approached, that was starting to change. And not helping things were some leadership struggles

that were happening within Fairchild. So again, one of Moore's fellow Traitorous Eight members, Robert Noyce, had really been acting as a leader among that group, and it was clear that he was seeking a leadership position at Fairchild as well. But Fairchild had based its executive team out of its main company, which was on the East Coast. So in other words, the people who were overseeing Fairchild Semiconductor, they weren't even located on the same coast as Fairchild Semiconductor.

They were managing it from across the United States. You know, this is back in the nineteen sixties, right, So there was a real disconnect there. You had people at Fairchild Semiconductor who felt that their executives had no real touch on anything that they were doing, and therefore they weren't really the right people to be placed in leadership positions.

There were also concerns about things like stock options, stuff like that that compensation packages for a fair Child Semiconductor were not equal to the amount of work the amount of profit their division was contributing to the overall company. So there was this feeling that Fairchild Semiconductor was making a lot of money for Fairchild, but that they weren't being recognized for that, and in turn that Fairchild CEO was using profits from the semiconductor division to fund acquisitions that,

to put it lightly, did not pan out. So Noise and more were feeling like their work was being exploited to fund bad business decisions, and also that they weren't really being compensated properly. By nineteen sixty seven, the overall Fairchild company wasn't doing well and the board of directors told its CEO to divest the company of those unprofitable acquisitions.

So at that point the CEO resigned and the board very pointedly decided to avoid Noise as a replacement, even though Noise had to step in at one point as part of a management committee to lead fair Child Semiconductor after the planned replacement a guy named Richard Hodgson didn't pan out, so once Noise found out that there was no chance he was going to get the job, even after he had to step into handle the mess that was left by the temporary CEO, he said, that's it.

I'm out of here, and he convinced More to do the same. So the two ended up resigning from fair Child Semiconductor. They did this in nineteen sixty eight, and they turned to an investor they knew by the name of Arthur Rock, and together the three of them were able to secure funding to found a new company. And then the question came up, as what do we call this new company. It's going to be a company that makes semiconductors and transistors and integrated circuits, but what do

we call it. The first idea they dismissed right away, which was to call it the more Noise Company. And if you are going to buy electronic components, you probably don't want to think about more noise than you know competing products might have, right, So instead they went with m Electronics or sometimes it was m in Electronics, but that was a very temporary name. By the end of the month, they had decided to change their company name so that it would reflect what they were focusing on,

which were integrated electronics. So they wanted to call it Intel. And there was one small hiccup, which was that there was already a hotel chain called Intel Co. That had trademarked the term Intel, so they had to actually negotiate with Intelco. And purchase the rights to Intel, which they did do and they were able to create their new company. So the early focus for Intel was developing stuff like

metal oxide semiconductor or MOSS technologies. More would later say that it was the perfect timing to get into that business, that MOSS was a technology that was just difficult enough to require ingenuity and innovation, but not so difficult that a startup would just falter right away while trying to develop the tech, Intel became known for developing memory chips in those early days. Memory is where computers store data for the purposes of operations, and there are different kinds

of memory. So there's like ROM that refers to read only memory, so that's memory that holds data that a computer can read from, but the computer cannot overwrite or change that data. Then there's RAM, or random access memory. This kind of acts like short term memory in people. So this is where computers will store data that they

may soon need for various operations. There are lots of different types of RAM, and Intel's work in developing memory chips solidified the company's spot in the tech sector, and it rapidly became quite successful. While Robert Noyce as the corporate leader for the first seven years of Intel's existence, he transitioned to become the chairman of the board in nineteen seventy five, and at that time Gordon Moore became

Intel's president. Four years later, nineteen seventy nine, Gordon Moore became the chairman of the board and the CEO of Intel. He would lead the company in that role until nineteen eighty seven. At that point, he resigned as CEO, but he remained the chairman of the board. He was named chairman emeritus in nineteen ninety seven, and he finally resigned his position on the board in two thousand and six.

So he led Intel while the company was really starting to become a powerful player in the tech space like this is also the time where we started to see the emergence of the personal computer and a lot of the things that Gordon Moore had predicted, this idea that electronics and computer systems would become inexpensive enough for the average person to be able to buy them, they were

becoming true. So the predictions he had made in the sixties were starting to be realized in the seventies and eighties, and it really showed how his predictions were well founded, right. It showed that good Moore had a lot of foresight back in the sixties. And yeah, Intel would see even greater heights after Moore's leadership. But the success really did affect Moore's life significantly. He became a billionaire, and in fact, he and his wife established philanthropic and charitable efforts for

lots of different causes, including things like environmental conservation. That was really important to Gordon Moore, and he contributed a lot of money to conservation efforts, specifically in the San Francisco area, but he also funded science organizations, he funded

medical organizations. He and his wife were really passionate about this and they ended up donating lots and lots like hundreds of millions of dollars billions, even to philanthropic efforts, so he got a big name in that field as well. He also was awarded more titles and awards and honorary degrees and things of that nature from almost an endless list of universities, research centers, and scientific organizations. It's easy to understand why because again his pivotal role in creating

the integrated circuit. Like he was one, he was not the only person, he was one person who contributed to that, but he consistently was an important figure in that. And it's undeniable that the technology we have today it is the way it is largely because of Gordon Moore and the people he worked with. He retired to the state of Hawaii. That's where he passed away on March twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, at the age of ninety four. And yeah,

he leaves behind an incredible legacy. It sounds to me like he wasn't always the easiest person to work with, although probably miles easier than people like William Shockley, but he definitely had an incredible passion for his work and for the science of chemistry. And you know, I really find it amazing to see people who are lead researchers in a field, in a scientific field, who then are able to leverage the things they learn into practical applications.

Like when you make that transition from science into technology, which is just science realized for practical applications, That to me is where the magic happens. I know that it's a little contradictory. We're not really talking magic, but you know kind of what I mean that inspiration that to me is a very very human quality. All right, that's it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out to me and suggest a topic for a future episode,

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