Gordon Moore, PhD ’54, gives the keynote address at Seminar Day 2002.

In 1996, Gordon and Betty Moore help dedicate Caltech’s Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering.

Calibrating Gordon Moore

“I look at the world as it exists,” says the Intel cofounder, Caltech trustee, and noted philanthropist.

By Hillary Bhaskaran

Like many Techers, Gordon Moore puts a lot of stock in numbers. They can serve as the litmus test when he’s viewing a presentation of someone’s work. “I have a bad habit of picking out numerical errors on slides,” he says, “and then not believing anything else.”

And as with many Techers, Moore’s attention to numbers has served him well. Phenomenally well.
He may not be a household name like Bill Gates, but the techie crowd will instantly recognize Gordon Moore as the man behind Moore’s Law and Intel, probably in that order. The Caltech alumnus (PhD ’54) is known for his leading role in the computer revolution, as well as for his rankings as a billionaire in Fortune magazine and his recent record-setting gifts to Caltech and Conservation International.

Of his accomplishments, Moore doesn’t put his famed “law” at the top of the list and points out that it isn’t a law at all. “It’s only relatively recently that I was even able to utter the term,” he says. Moore’s Law was an observation and prediction that he made in 1965 for an article in Electronics magazine. He observed that computer power, as measured by the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, was doubling every year. Extrapolating forward to account for potential improvements in technology, Moore predicted that this annual doubling would continue for the next 10 years. He was right. In 1975 he predicted that the rate, which was slowing, would change to a doubling every two years. The time span turned out to be closer to 18 months, the figure most often cited by the media when they refer to Moore’s Law.

Business Week recently credited Moore’s Law with capturing “the essence of semiconductor technology: relentless, geometric growth in chip power,” noting that “the results eventually would make electronics the world’s biggest industry and Moore’s next startup, Intel Corp., the world’s richest chipmaker.” Moore himself concedes that Moore’s Law became the name given to everything that changes exponentially in the industry, and he once told a reporter, “I’m perfectly happy to take credit for all of it.”

Moore’s original prediction was an ironic mix of foresight and self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the potential pace was articulated, computer revolutionaries went to work developing the technologies needed to shrink transistors and thus double computer power at breakneck speed.

Intel, which Moore cofounded in 1968, quickly became the biggest contender in the race. Now the world’s leading manufacturer of microprocessors, Intel is Moore’s greatest pride. “It’s unusual to have had the chance to participate in building such a company and to see it grow from a startup to a 30-billion-dollar company the year before last,” he says. “Not last year.”

Moore likes to keep track of things, such as the date when he and his wife, Betty, first saw the mountains of Pasadena emerge from the haze. (He says he can “calibrate” the September 17, 1950, occasion from his wedding date one week earlier.) But he can’t pinpoint when his interest in numbers began. “I’ve always liked math,” he says, noting that it ought to come easily to anyone considering a career in science and engineering.

It’s not hard for Moore to quantify the time frame during which his proclivities found an outlet. When he was 10, his family moved from his native Pescadero, California, to nearby Redwood City. Shortly afterward, his new next-door neighbor received a chemistry set. “In those days you got really interesting chemicals, even minor explosive mixtures,” he says. “Being able to follow the recipes in the book and seeing the results was fascinating.” Moore devised his own experiments and built up a home lab, well stocked to make nitroglycerine. “A couple of ounces of dynamite makes a marvelous firecracker,” he beams.

From then on, he was sure he would study chemistry in college, even though he had practically no role model to follow in such an endeavor. His father had quit school in seventh grade after Moore’s grandfather died. Only one relative, a cousin, had gone to college. Moore thinks she studied English to become a teacher. Despite his collegiate aspirations, Moore was a lazy student in high school, he admits. “I could get by easily and still get pretty good grades. The last year I buckled down more.”

His educational ascent was “gradual.” He went to San Jose State for two years, commuting from home by train. Improved study habits and good grades allowed him to transfer to Berkeley and then to attend graduate school at Caltech. Along the way, he met Betty Whittaker, who would receive a 1949 BA in journalism from San Jose State, relocate near Moore in Berkeley, and then marry him the day before the couple made a beeline for Caltech.

Moore chose Caltech over a few other schools for its reputation in chemistry and its small size. Campus social life was not an issue for the “freshly married” Moore, who, in any case, spent most of his time in the subbasement of Crellin—“not a high-traffic area,” he points out. He and Betty socialized with colleagues, including Hector Rubalcava, PhD ’56, and postdoc Roger Newman, and he learned a lot from professors Verner Schomaker, PhD ’38, Norman Davidson, and Richard Badger ’21, PhD ’24, his thesis advisor. The latter “had some research ideas that got me off to a rapid start,” says Moore, who appreciated the fact that Badger was “available when I wanted to see him but didn’t bother me otherwise.”

Linus Pauling made an impression on Moore. “I found him very intimidating. He could ask me my name in such a way that I didn’t know the answer,” he says. “I planned my final oral when he was away on a trip.”

Moore submitted his thesis on the infrared spectra and structure of a few simple molecules, and he took off for a research position at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, expecting to remain in or closely connected to academia. Then came a turning point.

“I found myself calculating the cost per word of the articles I was publishing at APL and wondering if, at $5 per word, the taxpayers were getting their money’s worth,” he says, adding that his basic research on infrared absorption lines and spectroscopic studies of flames was pretty abstract. “It was time to look for something more practical.” Although he rejected an offer from Lawrence Livermore, among other places, his Livermore application happened to be picked up by William Shockley.

Shockley, whose role as coinventor of the transistor would win him a share of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, succeeded in luring a diverse group of accomplished scientists, including Moore, to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Palo Alto, California. He then proceeded to antagonize and alienate enough of them to inspire an exodus.

Moore credits Shockley with causing two important changes in his life: “First of all, he got me into semiconductors, and secondly, he unwittingly gave me the push to go off and found Fairchild. He made an entrepreneur out of me—an accidental one.” When Moore and seven others, including Robert Noyce, left Shockley in 1957, the Nobelist dubbed them the Traitorous Eight.
The eight defectors went on to secure enough support from Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation to start Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which would develop silicon -transistors and commercialize the first integrated circuits, or microchips.

Eleven years later, unhappy with the parent company’s management policies, Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and founded Intel. Their company’s success and Moore’s role as executive vice president (1968–75), president (1975–79), CEO (1975–87), chairman (1979–97), and chairman emeritus (1997–01) are well documented. But Moore’s take on accidental entrepreneurship has received less attention.

The career twists and turns that resulted from working with and then leaving Shockley “got me into management at a much younger age than I would have otherwise,” says Moore. He wasn’t alone. “It was a very young industry,” he says. “We were all learning together.”

But to this day, he prefers delving into technical details to looking at the big picture. In management, “you don’t get the joy of discovering the details. I liked doing science and engineering, but somebody had to take the management job, and it fell on me.”

As it turned out, he says, “I evolved in that direction fairly naturally.” This would surely have surprised the psychologists at Dow Chemical (where he considered working in 1954) and Shockley Semiconductor Lab. The experts at both places had run Moore through personality tests to determine whether he had management potential. They all reached the same “amazingly grim conclusion,” says Moore, “that I would never be a manager.” He notes that Shockley’s people reached the same conclusion about Noyce.

Moore admits, “in retrospect, I’m not a very good manager. And Noyce was probably less of a manager than I am, though he was a phenomenal leader.” On what criteria does he base this evaluation? “Managers are people-focused,” he says. “They set directions and review projects. I was never very systematic at doing those things. For one thing, I’m a natural-born procrastinator.”

He learned some things the hard way, things that he might have learned less painfully in a management course or two, he says. For example, “when I’d meet to discuss work with subordinates, I thought I needed to know more than they did, and I was embarrassed when I didn’t. Later, one of my colleagues developed a very good one-on-one system” where he’d turn the tables and let the employee do the talking. “A lot more gets accomplished.” That colleague was Andy Grove, who succeeded Moore as CEO of Intel in 1987. “I claim he’s one of those people who got over his PhD,” Moore says of Grove, who “became very interested in how organizations work and less interested in technical details than I ever did.”

“But even without the usual management skills, I did okay,” says Moore. “In our industry, having technical understanding and vision is probably a lot more important than being able to run a project well.”

As venture capitalist Arthur Rock told Fortune magazine, “Gordon, more than anyone else, set his eyes on a goal and got everybody to go there.” Rock provided financial support to start Intel, served as its first chairman, and serves with Moore on the Caltech board of trustees, which Moore chaired from 1994 through 2000.

Moore operates on some deeply held values. He says he believes in “treating people in a straightforward manner and running a very open organization. The more people know,” he adds, “the more likely they are to make the right choices.” It helps if they’re smart, which is why Moore says he has always sought the very best people available, subscribing to the tenet “don’t hire your assistant, hire your replacement.” He adds, “I never felt uncomfortable having smarter people working for me.”

If Moore has an overriding philosophy, it may be this: “I look at the world as it exists, and figure out the best way to proceed.” In his fast-paced field, he has found that flexibility is key. “What works in one organization doesn’t in another.” Apparently, he figured out what worked at Intel, riding out booms and busts, valuing mistakes and successes.

“Along the way, we had to make some of the right decisions, to focus on the right products and the right technologies. This is a business where things change rapidly. If you zig when the rest of the world zags, your company goes down the tubes. You have to zig at the right time.”
Zigging at the right time seems to come naturally for Moore.

Take, for example, a recent cause. Gordon and Betty Moore, through their foundation (which they established in 2000) and through personal conviction, have become major supporters of Conservation International. CI is an environmentalist organization whose agenda centers on preserving Earth’s so-called “hot spots” of biodiversity. These hot spots make up only 1.4 percent of Earth’s land surface, but they are thought to contain some 60 percent of its terrestrial plant and animal species.

If enough of these hot spots can be “saved”—through preservation, eco-friendly land use, and the like—there may be hope for the future. If they can’t, says Moore, we are likely looking at “the last generation that will have wild places on Earth. These regions are being wiped out, opened up, and developed. We are seeing the impact of a single species gone amuck in the world.”

On a lighter note, he says that -“resort hotels and golf courses are nice, but they shouldn’t be everyplace.” For those who haven’t heard, Moore is not a golfer but a fishing enthusiast who will go as far as Vanuatu to get away from everything except family and exotic species. Over the years, in his quest for remote fishing locales, he realized that places such as Baja California were becoming increasingly developed. Since he counts his fish (and Betty’s), he also noticed that, as development went up, the number of fish species went down. This served as Moore’s indicator of a larger problem—the problem of exponential growth rather than the beauty of it, as encapsulated in Moore’s Law.

But what has prompted Moore to earmark some $300 million for preserving biodiversity rather than, say, K–12 education, the state of which he has also lamented? And what has prompted him to put both money and time behind Conservation International, serving as a board member and hosting meetings in nonremote places like Pasadena and Santa Monica?

The answer may rest with the numbers. Moore points to a theory that holds that “world population will peak sometime during this century and then drift down,” which would result in a decrease of pressure on resources some time after the population peak. “If you believe this,” he adds, it follows that “we have a chance at saving something that might then last a very long time.”

The chance to “preserve at least some of what’s left” of these hyper-rich ecosystems is tangible enough to spur Moore to put his energies and support behind it. He believes that Conservation International is well-positioned to help lead the way. “The attraction of CI is that it tries to be science-based,” he says. Its emphasis on hot spots is inspired by the work of biologists, including Oxford ecologist Norman Myers, who in 1988 developed the concept of focusing on these areas, which together total 524 million acres, a land mass three times the size of Texas. Moore has put $35 million into CI’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, which he says draws on “the natural inclination of scientists to measure resources.” Researchers are developing an “early warning system,” which pulls together data pointing them toward, say, economic conditions that lead to deforestation and which shows them satellite images of regions where deforestation is already in progress.

Looking beyond Conservation International’s scientific strengths, Moore points out that the organization has representatives on site in foreign countries, that it involves the local people in those countries, and that it has good relations with most of the governments. Still, Moore wants to see CI and other conservation organizations cooperate with each other, a task that does not always come naturally when egos and conflicting agendas come into play, he says, referring to the environmentalist arena as well as to other fields.

On the topic of scientific cooperation, he adds, “I was watching a Nova program recently about a paleontologist who hoarded a fossil for years before someone else finally got to study it. I can’t imagine hoarding a scientific treasure.”

In science and in management, Moore has high standards to which he holds people accountable, including the beneficiaries of his philanthropic efforts. When the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awards a grant, he says, the parties “negotiate measurable things that have to happen or be looked at in order to see how effective the grant was. This represents a new discipline for potential grantees.”

A quantitative approach offers “a valuable way to look at a lot of things,” says Moore. “If you can’t measure something, you’ll always wonder how well you understand it.” Of course, he adds “it’s hard to tie to a lot of emotional things.”

While Gordon and Betty Moore remain private people, the personal side of the Moore equation has added up to 51 years of marriage, two married sons, and two grandsons. All reside in the Bay Area. Kenneth, born soon after Moore graduated from Caltech in 1954, received his BS in business administration from San Jose State and is working for the Moore Foundation after having spent nearly 20 years at Philips Electronics. Steven received his BS in business management from Santa Clara University and has been the executive director of the separate and smaller Moore Family Foundation since it was established in 1986. Parents and sons share an interest in philanthropy that began during kitchen-table discussions and now plays out in meetings of the two Moore foundations.

In his role as philanthropist, Moore says his fortune constitutes both a luxury and a responsibility. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time and get more resources than I need. It’s nice to pursue things that I’m interested in and where I think I can have an impact.” He says it’s his responsibility to efficiently allocate the money. After all, he points out, “either I do it or the government will.”

“I’m egotistical enough to think that I can do better than the government,” at least in certain areas, he says. Those areas, as specified by the Moore Foundation, include scientific research, higher education, the environment, and Bay Area projects.

“If I knew how to improve primary education,” says Moore, “I’d do it. But so many people are throwing money at it, I don’t see what I could do differently that would have an impact.” On this note, he once told Technology Review that the challenge is “kind of like solving world hunger, the way I look at it.”

In some ways, Moore is picking up where the government leaves off. He has told the press that “the way research is funded in the U.S., with peer review and government projects, does a very good job on the mainstream. [But] it’s a lot harder for unusual, possibly hairbrained ideas to get funded.”

Which brings us to SETI. The controversial Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was dumped from the U.S. space program “because it was ridiculed by a couple of senators,” according to Moore. He “got involved in rescuing it, thinking it would work its way back into NASA funding.” Now, “six or seven years later, I’m disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be any movement in that direction. I’m not inclined to keep it going, not that I ever did,” he says, referring to his limited role in this effort.

Still, “it’s a legitimate part of NASA,” says Moore, refuting the notion that this is a hairbrained idea or even a dreamer’s indulgence. “Looking for life in other places is very interesting and gets the imagination of a lot of people. Should it be intelligent life, it would be a spectacular find. If you’re going to run a large space-exploration program, it fits in perfectly.

“If you look at the risk versus reward,” he adds, “though I’m not sure I did that very consciously, there’s a potentially huge payoff. If we discover signals, it could change the course of human history.

“It’s like trying to understand what consciousness is. It’s a mind-boggling concept. I’m not sure if it’s open to science or philosophy or what the eventual applications will be. But the fact that we do experiments in that direction is exciting, and the tools for understanding are coming along pretty rapidly. Imagine what the next hundred years will do,” says Moore of these and other endeavors. He cites the exponential progress in genomics and the promise that it “will lead to personalized medicine down the road.” If you look at the progress, you could establish another Moore’s Law curve,” he adds. “What you can do tomorrow depends on what you have done today.”

But the outcome of any line of research is anyone’s guess, he says. When the Fairchild lab under Moore’s direction invented the first integrated circuit with what were thought to be small, cheap transistors at 60 cents apiece, Moore says that everyone thought, “Okay, we’re done, what’s next? We didn’t realize that we had turned over the first stone in a rock pile. We had just opened the book. The economics would change completely, to the point where transistors would cost only one-millionth of a dollar or less per piece. We were just starting to understand what we were onto when Moore’s Law came about. Every once in a while something like this happens, but it’s not easily predictable. It’s very hard to look into the future and be correct.”

Moore, incidentally, says he’d rather be able to change the future than predict it. “I might predict a lot of problems, but if things didn’t change, that would be discouraging.” To him, Moore’s Law represents a good mix of the two because of its role as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If it’s up to Moore, no worthy stone will go unturned. As chairman emeritus of Caltech’s board of trustees, he has gotten a preview of the projects that faculty members would like to pursue, if only they had the resources. Moore trusts that his gift of $600 million will help them realize their goals. “The faculty have two sets of wish lists: one to do the exciting work they’re already doing, and the other to undertake a new set of programs that reach far beyond what they’re doing now. I can’t take care of everything on both lists, but I can hopefully stimulate other people and take a big step in that direction.”

Moore is betting on Caltech because, he says, “it really is a unique institution. It’s very, very good and small,” which results in extraordinary interdisciplinary work. Engineers and physicists “literally sit down at the same table for lunch. When Carver Mead would meet on Thursdays with Feynman, and you had those minds turned to microelectronics problems, imagine the cross-fertilization.” He points out how Mead, Caltech’s Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, brought electronics to bear on the way that biological systems work, which helped lay the groundwork for the field of neural network computing.

Moore sees Caltech not only as a hotbed of science but also as a business. “For Caltech to still be unique,” he says, “it has to do an especially good job of matching significant resources with the advantages that come from its small size and outstanding group of people. It needs a lot of resources to support science and engineering. Since government research projects don’t pay for themselves, the more successful Caltech is at getting contracts, the further in the hole it goes. I saw the chance to help in a way that will hopefully preserve Caltech’s position.”

Moore, who refers to himself as a “fairly quiet” person, was sparsely quoted in the press when news of his and Betty’s unprecedented gift to Caltech broke last fall. The couple’s personal gift of $300 million, combined with their foundation’s pledge of a like amount, represents the largest private donation ever to an institution of higher education.

Despite the staggering numbers, Moore remains a model of understatement. When he gave the press a few reasons for his gift, he mentioned his gratitude toward Caltech. As Moore put it, “the education I received there has served me well.”