Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary by Arnold Thackray, David Brock, and Rachel Jones (review)

A much needed book, Moore’s Law covers the life of Gordon Moore, one of the most influential people of the 20th and 21st centuries, yet who is “unknown outside a small cohort of admirers” (p. 501). Like the transistor itself, which has “failed to capture the public imagination” (p. 501), the people who made the devices that increasingly control and inhabit everything remain obscure. Nonetheless, if we are to understand the devices and business that inarguably are the most important of the last 50 years, we need biographies like this one.

Moore’s Law seeks to understand Moore by delving into his family’s almost 200-year history in California. The “entrepreneurial spirit” (p. 5) that drove his predecessors to migrate across North America is invoked to explain his 20th century activities, his ancestors’ later “settled ways,” and his “rootedness” in California (pp. 12-13). It’s a bit of a stretch. More believable is the assertion that his tendency to bury emotions with work and outdoor activities and to avoid conflict came from his parents, who were small town, hardworking folks (pp. 24-25). Those personal qualities remained constant and represent a major element in Moore’s personal and professional life.

A boyhood fascination with chemistry, especially explosives, culminated in a PhD in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he also learned glassblowing and the construction of sophisticated instrumentation. Those skills and his orientation as an experimentalist, not a theoretician, fostered his later success. His first job, at John Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, soon struck him as ultimately not worthwhile. A fateful 1956 call from William Shockley the world’s foremost solid-state physicist, put Moore squarely in what became the center of a new industry based on silicon transistors. Shockley’s genius was outweighed by his horrific management and interpersonal skills, and in a story familiar enough to have generated television documentaries, Moore and seven others found backing in 1958 to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a firm whose quick success formed the basis for what became Silicon Valley.

For the layperson, semiconductor physics, semiconductor materials, and the devices made therefrom are difficult to understand. This book does an admirable job explaining them in simple terms, perhaps at the cost of obscuring the difficulties and challenges Fairchild (and later Intel) R&D faced. Wrestling with a variety of complex problems, they managed to corral silicon into working devices. Some of the excitement and energy that effort took is missing in this telling; compared with the same story in Leslie Berlin’s biography of Robert Noyce (one of Moore’s key partners) it falls a bit flat. The intellectual and personal effort and exhilaration of those days, and the resultant success, must have been major inducements to continued efforts, yet it is not conveyed here with the urgency that the participants must have felt.

By 1962, Moore was the world’s foremost expert in the silicon/silicon-oxide (Si/SiO) system that formed the basis of “printing” transistors and the new integrated circuit (IC). His role as Fairchild’s head of R&D and his broad understanding of both materials and production processes rendered the fundamental insight that became Moore’s law. Integrated electronics had substantial economic advantages that would ensure functional dominance; applied to mass-produced standardized products, the manufacturing technology developed in the late 1950s had tremendous potential for ongoing development, given large investments of money and effort. Looking back from 1965, and then extrapolating, Moore predicted that the complexity of ICs would double annually (later changed to every two years), while the price sharply dropped. Moore’s law became a goal for the industry, one in action to this day. The result was an increasing ubiquity of transistors.

The law guided Moore’s career from that point. Constantly pushing developments across an array of manufacturing technologies, Moore made sure that investments in the Si/SiO system were at...