NOVEMBER 7--The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA; San Jose, CA; www.sia-online.org) has honored Gordon E. Moore, cofounder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation, with the SIA 25th Anniversary Lifetime Achievement Award. In selecting Moore as the recipient of its award, the SIA board of directors took note of his lifetime contributions to the information technology industry, the community, and the Semiconductor Industry Association as a board member and chairman.
"Gordon Moore is an innovator and industry legend, he is a superb leader, motivator, businessman, philanthropist, and educator," stated SIA president George Scalise. "There is no one in the Valley who has not been impacted by his work, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his uncanny ability to foresee the pace of innovation in the chip industry."
With the articulation of Moore's Law in 1965, which observed that the number of chips on a transistor, and its raw computing power, was doubling roughly every couple of years, and that computing capability would not require a commensurate increase in cost, Moore captured the essence of semiconductor technology: relentless, geometric growth in chip power, accompanied by a proportionate decrease in cost. Moore has authored the foreword to a new book on the semiconductor industry, released by the SIA as part of its 25th anniversary celebration. Thinking back to the late 1950s, when Silicon Valley was still a dozen years from a name, Moore writes, "What if we had been told then that in our lifetimes that all the computer power then in the world would be available on a single descendent of those little transistors we were designing--and that someday that device would be built by the hundreds of millions each year? Would we have believed it?"
A native of California, Gordon Moore received a BS in chemistry from the University of California-Berkeley and a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology. He was a founder of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 as part of a group of leaders known as the Fairchild Eight and cofounded Intel, with Bob Noyce, in 1968. Moore became chief executive officer of Intel in 1975, was elected chairman and CEO in 1979, served as CEO until 1987, and was named chairman emeritus in 1997.
