Biography | Gordon Moore — The Palo Alto Lab That Asked Him What the Next Ten Years of Chips Would Look Like

The article is dated 19 April 1965.

The place behind it is this lot.

In 1957 Moore left Shockley's Mountain View laboratory with seven colleagues and helped open Fairchild Semiconductor at 844 Charleston Road, Palo Alto.

The building is still there, with granite plaques on the sidewalk.

Moore became director of research and development.

By the early 1960s Fairchild had added larger plants in Mountain View.

The research title stayed with him.

Lewis Young, editor of Electronics, asked him for a piece in a thirty-fifth-anniversary issue on the future of microcircuitry.

Moore plotted the number of components Fairchild had placed on a chip, at minimum cost, from 1959 to 1965, then drew the line forward.

The magazine title was "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits."

He projected that the economical component count would keep doubling each year for about a decade, toward something like 65,000 components by 1975.

Carver Mead later popularized the phrase Moore's Law.

In 1975, by then at Intel, Moore himself slowed the forecast to a doubling about every two years.

The 1965 paper was not a physical law.

It was a cost curve written by the man who ran the laboratory that had to hit it.

IEEE later set a Moore's Law milestone plaque at the old Shockley address on San Antonio Road, a mile from here.

The writing itself belongs to Fairchild's Palo Alto research years.

This pin is the founding Fairchild building, the one a visitor can still stand in front of.

Photo: Gordon Moore, 1978, Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.