How Gordon Moore, one of ‘traitorous eight’ who quit Nobel laureate’s lab, helped build Silicon Valley

Early pioneer of semiconductors, proposer of Moore’s Law and co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore died in Hawaii Friday aged 94 with estimated $7 bn in fortune.

Billionaire philanthropist Gordon Moore died in his home in Hawaii on Friday, at the age of 94 | Photo: Commons

Bengaluru: In the late 1950s, a group of eight male researchers decided they had had enough of working with an authoritarian Nobel Prize winner, and quit their employer to establish their own company.

This group was called the “traitorous eight”, and these PhD graduates in physics and chemistry had been working on the brand-new idea of semiconductors under laureate William Shockley.

The researchers’ new venture that began in 1957 set the base platform for all of Silicon Valley to be directly built over it.

One of the eight was the late Gordon Moore, the famous co-founder of Intel Corporation. His grasp of the growth of semiconductors was pioneering, and he eventually became even better known for his rule that stated that every two years, the number of transistors on a microchip would double – aka Moore’s Law.

In 2011, Moore’s became the first human genome to be sequenced using a new type of personal genome sequencer based on an instrument called an ion-sensitive field-effect transistor.

The billionaire philanthropist died in his home in Hawaii on Friday, at the age of 94, closing the life chapter of yet another pioneering and hugely profitable early American visionary in Silicon Valley, California.

Moore’s Law

In 1965, Moore was already an established early pioneer of semiconductors, and had a valuable understanding of their scope and the role they would play in humanity’s future. That year, he published an article in which he proposed “Moore’s Law”, based on what he had learned from his own work in the semiconductor industry and his invention of versions of early transistors and integrated circuits.

He could see that advances could be made quite rapidly, and proclaimed that the number of components in an integrated circuit – such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes – would double every year for 10 years. Exactly a decade later, after an exponential growth in early electronics, he updated his prediction to “transistors doubling every two years”.

This law has been used as a standard, and even a target, by the semiconductor industry, as metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) devices we use today can be scaled easily and rapidly with low power consumption.

In the last three to four decades, integrated circuits and chips have become smaller and smaller, holding more and more components. The miniaturisation in the semiconductor industry still continues, with rapidly decreasing sizes and increasing abilities, in an unparalleled growth.

Over the years, electronic devices such as laptops and chargers have also become smaller and more compact with increased functionality, while appliances like refrigerators and television have become more powerful with increased energy savings.

Founding Silicon Valley

In 1955, American physicist Shockley founded the very first advanced technology (“high-tech”) Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, after having secretly worked on technology to develop an efficient transistor at Bell Labs.

Shockley was one of the very first to join Bell Labs and worked there during and after the Second World War. He was the manager of a research group that included fellow physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, and the three would later win the joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for their work.

Shockley discovered that his name was left out of multiple patent applications that were filed by others based on his discoveries, so he continued his work and eventually founded his own semiconductor company.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was the first company to work on silicon semiconductor devices and set the trend for other companies, which eventually paved the way for Silicon Valley.

However, Shockley, according to reports, turned into a “paranoid, racist, autocratic, and erratic manager” over the next couple of decades, leading to the “traitorous eight” leaving his company and establishing their own.

Moore, who led the team, had earlier asked executives for a solution to the “Shockley Problem”, but seeing none come along, decided to quit.

The eight researchers, under the backing of businessman and investor Sherman Fairchild, formed their own company together.

Fairchild Semiconductor International, founded in 1957, went on to become the leading company to manufacture transistors. The very first batch of 100 transistors, which were developed by the late Moore, were sold to the computing giant IBM in 1958, and to others, to build systems for American missiles.

In 1960, under the leadership of Moore, Fairchild built a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, inventing integrated circuits which form the basis of nearly every device we use today.

Moore was among the last of the original founders to leave Fairchild, co-founding NM Electronics, which would later become Intel Corporation, with his fellow Fairchild founder Robert Noyce, in 1968.

Intel and industry legacy

INTegrated ELectronics, or Intel, was an early inventor of memory chips, which was its major source of revenue from 1968 to 1971.

In 1971, the company achieved a breakthrough and produced the world’s first commercial microprocessor chip. These little circuits on silicon devices could act as the central processing unit (CPU) in computers.

The chip was considered an experimental success, but did not become commercially successful until the personal computer (PC) started to be widely available in the 1980s.

Intel became a market leader in microprocessor chips from the early 1990s, dominating the PC industry along with Microsoft’s early operating systems.

The success of the Silicon Valley mega-corporation was well-reflected in Moore’s life; he was worth $7 billion when he died.

Moore and his wife Betty established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000, donating substantially to environmental conservation, science, and research in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Moore was also awarded with multiple recognitions by engineering and research societies across America and Europe, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Medal of Honour, the body’s highest recognition, in 2008, as well as the highest US civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)