Gordon Moore

Gordon Earle Moore was an American electrical engineer who co-founded Intel Corporation with Robert Noyce in July 1968 and helped build it into the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer, serving as executive vice president, then president, and finally chairman and chief executive from 1979 to 1987. In a 1965 paper he observed that the number of components that could be fitted onto an integrated circuit had roughly doubled every year since the technology's invention and predicted the trend would continue, an observation later dubbed Moore's Law that became a guiding target for the semiconductor industry's pace of innovation for decades. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 and received the National Medal of Technology in 1990, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor in 2008. With his wife Betty he established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000, funding environmental and scientific research with roughly five billion dollars.