Silicon Valley Companies Research Articles

SALUTING THE GURU OF SEMICONDUCTORS

GORDON E. MOORE NEVER INtended for his offhand prediction 40 years ago to become an industrial mantra. His so-called Moore's law, which originally held that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a single chip will double every year, was a simple rule of thumb merely to illustrate how technology can grow exponentially But remarkably since 1965, when Moore first postulated the idea in an article in Electronics magazine, Moore's law has become ayardstick for the microprocessor industry, which sets its goals based on achieving that standard. Although Moore revised the law in 1975 to a doubling every two years, it has become a selffulfilling prophecy where realizes it has to go that fast or fall behind, he says. Moore's legacy involves much more than a catchy formula, however. He's one of the fathers of the semiconductor industry itself, a chemist who cofounded the Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and ...