Gordon E. Moore

Co-founding two of the major companies manufacturing ICs today is just one major achievement that has distinguished Moore's career. In 1965, eight years after co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore noted in a magazine article that for the previous three years, the number of components on a chip had doubled every year. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for another 10 years, with chips doubling in complexity until they reached 65,000 components per chip. However, chip complexity continued to double long after 1975. To Moore's surprise, what he had postulated as a "rule of thumb" became "Moore's Law," the guiding principle that spurred the industry to deliver ever more powerful chips at proportionate decreases in cost. This principle has been the driving force behind the growth of Intel Corp., which Moore co-founded in 1968.