Gordon Moore, RIP
When I started my career, I saw the future. It was a simple little plastic device with three legs. Inside was a piece of silicon that could be arranged as NPN or PNP. My first steps in higher education involved the study of these amazing — if not magical — little devices.
The transistor has a collector, a base, and an emitter. Current flow from the collector to the base, but where it could be controlled by the current flow from the base. We thus had a control of current, and the first applications were with amplifiers of current. A small change in the input current — such as from a microphone — could create a much large change in the output current. But the big change came when we used these as an ON or OFF device — and so our digital world was created. Unfortunately, on 25 March 2023, a giant of the building of the semiconductor industry passed away: Gordon Moore.
In the late 1950, it was Bill Shockley at Bell Labs who created the transistor, but he was rather difficult to work with, and so eight of the team — including Gordon Moore — left to found Fairchild Semiconductor. For several decades, Fairchild Semiconductor was one of the leaders in the semiconductor area.
It was Gordon, in 1964, who plotted the growth in the number of transistors that could be fitted onto a single microchip, and found that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto an…
