Gordon Moore gives 'oral history' interview

Peter Clarke

April 9, 2008

Peter Clarke

LONDON — Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), has been interviewed by Craig Addison of industry body Semiconductor Equipment Materials International (SEMI) as part of its "oral history" series.

Moore discusses his time at Shockley Laboratories as a blower of glass tubes — glass jungles — and some of the mistakes made, including the evaporation of thousands of dollars of platinum.

Moore is a chemist by training and the interview reveals how after the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor he took on the task of developing diffusion and metallization techniques, while Robert Noyce was responsible for developing photolithography, mainly in house.

"The machine we made for making masks was one that was developed internally, initially, using three lenses for 16-mm movie cameras, and it stepped three masks at a time for the three different patterns," Moore is quoted as saying. Moore also discusses how one Fairchild developer went off to form Electroglas and sold diffusion furnaces back to Fairchild — effectively the birth of the semiconductor equipment industry.

Moore stresses how the decision to work with outside suppliers was a fundamental tenet at the foundation of Intel and interviewer Addison contrasts this with IBM and Texas Instruments who were hold outs for in-house developed equipment.

Moore also expounds on getting equipment design-ins with Intel, wafer size transitions, and semiconductor economic cycles. He also introduces the interesting aphorism about how to weather those cycles: "The philosophy was: You never get well on the old products." Later on he is quoted saying: "In fact, you even have to accelerate the development of the new stuff across these negative periods."

Moore also speaks, as he has done many times elsewhere, about his eponymous law, saying that it was far more accurate than he had any right to expect.

The full interview could be found here when this story was first posted.