Intel at 50: Moore’s Law

The integrated circuit was only six years old in 1965 when Gordon Moore articulated “Moore’s Law,” the principle that would guide microchip development from that point forward. Moore was director of research & development at Fairchild Semiconductor, the same firm where Robert Noyce had conceived the integrated circuit in 1959. In the years following Noyce’s breakthrough, the applications for the new technology were primarily of interest to the military, but as engineers continued to refine the devices, integrated circuits showed a propensity to steadily grow in complexity while dropping in price. Observing these trends, Moore published a paper entitled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” in the April 19, 1965, issue of the trade journal Electronics.