Intel co-founder Gordon Moore dies at 94

The co-founder of the US chip manufacturer Intel, Gordon Moore, has died at the age of 94. The company announced this on Friday (local time). Moore was considered a pioneer of the semiconductor industry. The American co-founded NM Electronics with Robert Noyce in 1968, which later became Intel. He was considered an energetic engineer. Under his and Noyce's leadership, Intel invented the microprocessors that paved the way for the personal computer (PC) revolution.

Together with his development team, he finally ensured that Intel processors were installed in more than 80 percent of all computers worldwide. "It's really nice to be in the right place at the right time," Moore said in a 2005 interview.

“I was very fortunate to enter the semiconductor industry when it was still in its infancy. And I've had the opportunity to go from the time we couldn't make a single silicon transistor to the time we could put 1.7 billion of them on a chip. It was a phenomenal trip.”

He was also known for the “Moore's Law” that he defined. Moore, who studied physics and chemistry in California and completed his doctorate, predicted as early as 1965 that the number of integrated circuits in the same area would double about every two years, and he was right in his assumption. While the first transistor was the size of a matchbox in 1947, today there are tens of millions on the surface of a fingernail.

Thanks to Moore's prediction, computer chips have become exponentially more efficient and cheaper as chipmakers have stepped up their research and development resources to see if the law actually holds true. This not only drove global technological progress, but also enabled the development of the Internet and Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google.

Gordon Moore was executive president of Intel until 1975. He was chairman and CEO from 1979 to 1987, a position he held until 1997. In 2002, President George W. Bush honored Moore with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. In 2013, Forbes magazine estimated the entrepreneur's net worth at $4.1 billion.