Oral History of Gordon Moore

Interviewed by:
Craig Addison
Recorded: January 25, 2008
Mountain View, California

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Oral History of Gordon Moore

Craig Addison: Well, thanks very much, Gordon. The story of how Shockley recruited you to go to workfor him is well told, so let me jump straight into when you were at Shockley Labs, what specifically were
you doing in those months?

Gordon Moore: Well, when I got to Shockley Labs, I didn't know anything about semiconductors, really.
And because that was very early in the history of the industry, there wasn't an awful lot known when you
come right down to it. I was a physical chemist by training. Shockley knew chemists did some goodthings for him at Bell Labs, so he needed one out here. My job turned out to be to set up some of the
diffusion technology and do experiments to figure out how to make diffused silicon devices. It was reallya learning experience. What we were doing was different than what had been tried before. We had torepeat some of the Bell Labs experiments and then move on from there. It was really interesting work todo, very exploratory in nature.

Addison: And where did you get the equipment and the materials to do this?

Moore: The equipment and materials generally weren't available. The stuff we bought for equipment
was standard laboratory kinds of things -- laboratory furnaces, generally heated by glow bars, because
you had to get up to high temperatures, 1200, 1250 degrees centigrade in order to do the siliconprocessing we wanted. And not many furnaces were capable of operating those temperature ranges.
But the standard laboratory equipment that you could buy didn't have flat temperature zones, forexample. Typically these were tube furnaces that were big enough to put a small piece of silicon in.
Materials were a problem. In fact, one of Shockley's first major projects there was a new way of growing
silicon that would avoid the contamination that generally came out of the crucible. That was a big project,
although it never ended up quite being functional. Other equipment we could buy standard, bell jar
evaporators, for example, which were useful for putting down thin films. But we had to build a lot of it
ourselves. I remember building a water system that involved several five-gallon jars of water connected
together so you could get distilled water to rinse the wafers with. [It was s case of] building laboratoryscale equipment from what you could buy out of the typical laboratory supply houses.

Addison: I've also read that the gas “jungles” for the diffusion furnace, they were all blown by you? The
glass blowing?

Moore: That was one of my jobs. In my education and subsequent work, I'd done a lot of technical glass
blowing, making the old gas jungles that let you manipulate gases and purify materials. So I took thesame technology and used it for the controls over the diffusion furnaces. Initially quite simple things, andthen they became increasingly complicated as we figured more things we wanted to do.

Addison: Now, because you were breaking new ground, I'm sure a lot of mistakes were made. Anystories about things that went drastically wrong?

Moore: We were doing new things and some of us succeeded in doing some pretty dumb things. We
had one engineer who sealed some silicon and some arsenic into a quartz capsule and shoved it into thefurnace. He forget to look up the vapor pressure of arsenic and the tube exploded and arsenic vapors
went all around the laboratory. That was a case of fairly poor judgment. But we had some accidental
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successes. One problem we were having was making silicon junctions that had what we called hard
breakdowns. They really showed the kind of characteristic you wanted in a diode. And I was diffusing
gallium into silicon, and controlling the gallium concentration by water vapor and hydrogen to determine
how much gallium oxide evaporated. And one time I ran out of water, and the net result was a lot moregallium evaporated It formed puddles on the silicon wafer. The wafer came out just looking terrible.
Those were the hardest junctions we ever made. In retrospect, it turned out that the liquid gallium metalgettered the impurities that were in the silicon causing the diodes to be bad in the first place. And thosewere actually the diodes that were used by Shockley, [Tom] Sah and Noyce in their study on spacecharge recombination, because they were ones that behaved theoretically the way the diodes should.

Addison: And there was also the story about you melting some expensive material. What was it?

Moore: Well, one of the furnaces that I tried to design after deciding that we needed a long flat zone…I
used platinum winding. I ordered a significant amount of platinum wire since the melting point of platinum
was above where we had to be. I put double windings on the ends to compensate for the heat losses
and actually got a fairly good flat zone in the furnace. Unfortunately, the furnace only lasted for about two
weeks before the element burned out. It turns out that while platinum doesn't melt at these temperatures,
somehow or other it sublimes. When we took the furnace apart, there were little crystals of platinum
away from where the wire had been, and we had to send it off to a recovery company to salvage thisseveral thousand dollars worth of platinum that were in the furnace.

Addison: Did Bill Shockley get involved very much in what you were doing, sort of looking over yourshoulder?

Moore: Shockley didn't get involved very much in what I was doing. He was a physicist, I was a chemist,
so he didn't think he had to know everything that I presumably was doing. He was useful for broadconcepts. The one place he did get involved where we disagreed fairly strongly was when he wanted tochange his objective from making a silicon transistor to making a four layer diode. He was going from ageneral purpose device to one with, at best, very narrow applications, and would have required
essentially the same technology.

Addison: From a technical point of view, did that really change the equipment you needed?

Moore: Well, that didn't need to change the equipment much. It probably simplified some things
because it only required contacts on the top and the bottom. It didn't require anything to interior layers,
but that was mainly a device assembly simplification. The processing was pretty much the same. It wasusing diffusions and evaporations of metal, that sort of thing.

Addison: Looking back, how much progress do you think you made in the 15 or 18 months that you
were there, in terms of perfecting the process? Was it that you made leaps and bounds, or was it slow
going?

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Moore: Well, I don't think we moved the state of the art ahead very much. Looking back at it, it was
really a dirty facility. It was hardly more than a Quonset hut, no air conditioning, no clean room capability
at all. The net result was we had a very difficult time making devices with good electrical characteristics.
We learned a lot of things not to do, and when we went off and started Fairchild, we could use thatknowledge of what not to do to start off in a new direction with a much better idea of where we wanted togo eventually.

Addison: Well, moving on to Fairchild, when I interviewed Jay Last a while back, he said he just thought
it was amazing that you got this transistor factory up from an empty factory to a production floor in, like,eight months. Could you talk about how you saw that and your perspective on the first several months at
Fairchild, the challenges?

Moore: Well, Fairchild got started, again, with the idea of making a double diffused silicon transistor. We
thought we knew the direction we wanted to go. We divided up the various elements that had to be inplace among the senior staff there, and each set out to do it. I took on diffusion and metallization, forexample. Jay and Bob Noyce took on developing photo lithography. I worked on some of the assembly
technology. Sheldon Roberts worried about growing silicon crystals. Essentially, we divided up the job
among the people who were used to doing the kind of equipment preparations that were necessary. And
we went out, then, to get the equipment we thought would be suitable for what we were tackling. We built
furnaces that took advantage of an element that was available from Sweden that was capable of going tothese high temperatures and not burning out in a couple of weeks. All of the equipment for the photo
lithography had to be developed from scratch. Photo lithography had been used for printed circuitboards, but we wanted to really apply it to production silicon technology, and that required everything
new. We had to develop the mask-making technology as well as the techniques for coating wafers withthe photo resist material and so forth. So it was an extensive amount of new technology that we werebringing to bare in our first products.

Addison: So you weren't buying outside…the photo lithography was all in-house built?

Moore: 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. And by having them all tied together, any error in one was repeated in the others so the mask
would actually align with one another.

Addison: Were there any special challenges in procuring materials for transistor production?

Moore: Getting pure enough chemicals was always a problem. We frankly didn't know how pure we had
to get them, so we got the best available and pushed the suppliers to continue to improve the purity. The
silicon itself… initially we thought we had to grow our own crystals, but I guess [Dean] Knapic, who had
been with us at Shockley, set up a company at that time to grow silicon crystals and supply themcommercially. So, while we made our own crystals in the very beginning, as soon as we could buy themon the outside, we abandoned that particular part of the business.

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Addison: And still on materials, did you ever work on anything like gallium arsenide during your time at
Fairchild?

Moore: Not during that time. Now, later on, after Fairchild was well established in the silicon business, in
the R&D lab, we did work with gallium arsenide and looked at other materials. We did enough withgallium arsenide to convince ourselves it wasn't going to replace silicon generally.

Addison: All right. Now, there's also the story of Art Lasch, and I believe that you encouraged him to go
off and make the capillaries and then eventually he started his own company.

Moore: Art Lasch was my technician for a good part of the time there. He helped me build the furnaces.
And then when we developed the gold ball bonding technology, where a small gold wire was put througha glass capillary that could be used to squish it onto…to make the contacts, we had a problem that thecapillaries kept getting plugged. So we had to have a significant supply of these. Art became very goodat making these things. So he was encouraged by our production people -- Gene Kleiner in particular,
who was in charge of that -- essentially to moonlight and make glass capillaries on the outside and deliver
them to us. Well, that business grew, and Art next upgraded the design of the furnaces we'd built at
Fairchild and started supplying furnaces also from his company, Electroglas. And that was really the firstcompany I know of that was specifically set up to deliver equipment to the semiconductor industry.

Addison: I guess there were no IP issues back then. His furnace was based on your furnace, but hedidn't particularly mind about that?

Moore: It wasn't that much, and the furnaces we designed used commercially available elements. There
was nothing that we thought especially patentable. And Art picked it up and improved it. And as so often
is the case in the semiconductor industry, it wasn't long before the furnaces being supplied on the outsidewere better than the ones we were building internally.

Addison: So you started buying from Electroglas eventually and stopped making your own?

Moore: Yes. And other people got into the furnace business also. But that's been repeated over andover again, that a company dedicated to supplying the equipment that has a broad market ends up doinga better job than an in-house equipment supply capability can. So, when we set up Intel, we decided
we'd do nothing on equipment internally, we'd work with the vendors, and even if this resulted intechnology we developed getting transferred to the rest of the industry, it would be the most effective way
for us to continue to grow.

Addison: Well, let's move on to Intel. I'll get on to the supplier relationship later, but first wanted to ask
about your very first fab at Intel. What were the challenges in getting that up and running and working?

Moore: At Intel, the challenge of the first fab was just getting it done in a hurry. We set, I believe, it wasfour goals that we had to accomplish before we could really make devices, and set up a wager between

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the people who had to do it and the people who were watching to see if it could be done. These werepretty aggressive. It required getting these things done by the end of that first year [1968]. Now, we
started really the beginning of August, and we wanted to get them done by the end of December. So, it
was really a challenge just to get it done. In fact, the last goal was actually achieved, I believe, on the
31st of December with a little fudging in order to make that happen.

Addison: Do you remember the specific goals?

Moore: One of them was to make a stable MOS device, which requires getting everything purified andthe like, and that was the last one that was accomplished, but it was accomplished by putting a barrier
layer in rather than by cleaning things up so much that we could do it directly. But they involved the usual
things about being able to make good junctions and so forth. They were relatively trivial but things thattook time to set up. And the challenge of going from essentially an empty building to being able toaccomplish these things in a span of August, September, October, November, December, just fivemonths, was really a challenge. We gave each of the engineers a book of purchase orders -- each of theengineers responsible for a particular area. Not requisitions that had to go through a purchasing
department or anything, but the engineer would talk to the salesman for the equipment, handwrite thepurchase order and hand it to them as soon as the equipment was specified, just to get everything goingin a hurry. It shocked the salesmen quite often. They didn't know what to do with this kind of apurchasing procedure, but it was very effective in a startup.

Addison: As a follow-on to that, I've read in Leslie Berlin's book that Eugene Flath went to the Wescon
show and basically was buying stuff off the floor; that was kind of the same thing?

Moore: I'm sure that's the case. The Wescon show came at the right time of year for us to do that. And
we needed the equipment pretty badly. I think an evaporator came right off the floor. I don't remember
what else, but I know rather than have the company ship the equipment back to their factories, if we could
get it shipped to Intel at that time, it helped us get started in a hurry.

Addison: So in building that first fab at Intel, you could get all the equipment off the shelf from outside?
Was there anything you had to build?

Moore: I don't remember us really having to build everything. We had to adapt a few things. In
particular, we had to adapt an epitaxial reactor to deposit poly crystal and silicon. We tried to do thesilicon gate MOS. But the only things we would build would be a few relatively simple jigs and fixtures.
We just tried to work with the equipment industry.

Addison: You talked about this a little bit before…companies like IBM and TI built their own equipment,
and they were sort of hold-outs; they resisted buying from independent suppliers for a long time because
they thought that was their competitive edge. But you were completely the opposite at Intel. What wasyour thinking in terms of not wanting to have any proprietary in-house equipment?

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Moore: The thinking, about our approach at Intel, resulted from some of the problems we'd gotten in at
Fairchild, the typical situation being we would build a first generation of equipment that would work. What
we learned would be picked up by the equipment vendors, and pretty soon the equipment available on
the outside was better than the stuff we did internally. I mentioned earlier where this happened on
diffusion furnaces. Probably the strongest example had to do with epitaxial reactors. Again, in the
beginning, we had to build our own. There was no equipment industry to supply them. But we built a
couple of kluges that worked after a fashion, but their commercial machines turned out to be a lot better
than what we were doing internally. So it wasn't long before we had to abandon our internal efforts andadopt what was available on the outside. And we began to see this as a pattern; that you just couldn't
maintain state-of-the-art equipment internally because you didn't have the customer base that needed
something new all the time to let you keep improving things. You kind of got locked into a generation fora long period of time and would have to make a big improvement, which was a lot harder to do. So, theequipment industry and the semiconductor processing industry really were very complementary andincreasingly I think that split has been recognized by everybody.

Addison: Now, in talking about working closely with suppliers, I believe you actually invested in Applied
Materials.

Moore: That's right, I did. I was interested at that time in doing some venture capital kind of things.
Applied Materials looked like an interesting possibility. I guess I never expected we'd end up being theirbiggest customer. In fact, when Intel started doing much with Applied Materials, I sold my investment in
it. It started to look more like a conflict of interest.

Addison: So your investment wasn't so much to support an equipment company but just a VC type ofinvestment.

Moore: That's right. I was looking at it as a financial investment rather than as something to help us getequipment later down the road.

Addison: And then I also believe you were on the board of MicroMask with Joe Ross?

Moore: That's right, I was on the board of MicroMask for quite a while.

Addison: What was your motivation for that?

Moore: Again, I went on it early. It was an opportunity to get on the board of a company and learnsomething about how somebody else worked.

Addison: So it wasn't helping to get masks for Intel?

Moore: Well, that was a case where we were buying quite a bit of stuff from MicroMask, and I wasinterested in make sure that we had a good supply. At that time, Intel thought it could buy its masks on
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the outside also. We didn't have an internal mask-making operation. As the industry developed and themask demands became much greater than they were in the beginning, we just had to start doing it inhouse. And about the same time Intel set up a significant mask-making operation in-house, MicroMask
kind of disappeared. So the timing worked out reasonably well.

Addison: Were there any other suppliers that you worked really closely with in those first few years?
Lam or KLA or Tencor or anyone else?

Moore: We worked with a variety of them. We certainly worked with Lam quite a bit. And, you know, myinvolvement got less and less in the details of these things, so my memory is increasingly fuzzy. But theidea was we'd work with the equipment vendors to get what we needed.

Addison: Now, let's talk about the Japanese equipment vendors. Do you have any recollection of when
they appeared on your radar screen and when you started buying from them?

Moore: Well, the place they really appeared was in photo lithography. The big steppers were coming
out of Canon and Nikon. There wasn't a comparable piece of equipment in the U.S. And that was such a
critical part of the entire process, we got very concerned about where it was coming from. We had amajor program, in fact, with a Lichtenstein company to make a stepper. Very sophisticated but also very
expensive, and the development went too slowly for them to really make an impact on the market. We
ended up buying Japanese equipment because it was the best available, and there wasn't really analternative source for that. And I guess that's still the case now with lithography equipment.

Addison: Except for ASML in Europe.

Moore: Yeah, okay, the European company's an alternative. The concern, of course, was that theJapanese were going to expand from there and take over the entire equipment industry. And then we got
concerned that we wouldn't have the access to it that we had with other suppliers, so that became
increasingly our paranoia as the Japanese were making increasing inroads into the whole semiconductor
industry.

Addison: I understand that Bob Noyce lobbied in support of the lithography industry and there was aparticular sale of a company and he tried to stop that from being sold to Japan. Do you have any
recollection of that?

Moore: I know Bob worried about this a good deal, and I'm sure he lobbied to try to keep the U.S. ahead.
It was something that he thought was pretty important. To a significant extent, that kind of thing was whatdrove the industry toward the SEMATECH operation, something where we could do a lot of theequipment work in one place.

Addison: Well, that's the next question…SEMATECH. Some equipment suppliers that I've talked tohave said that before SEMATECH, they were frustrated because the device makers wouldn't share their

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future road maps with them. Therefore, they couldn't design equipment. But after SEMATECH,, thatchanged. Did you see that wall between device and equipment companies in terms of not sharing roadmaps and so forth?

Moore: I hope that wasn't the case with Intel. We tried to make sure the equipment vendors were there
when we needed the equipment. But, you know, it's a complicated deal. The equipment vendors had tomatch the schedules of the semiconductor suppliers. I remember giving a talk at a SEMI meeting once,
trying to explain this problem generally, that the bus leaves on a particular sort of technology at aparticular time, and if they're not in that first bunch of equipment, they lose that whole generation. They
can come in six months later with a better machine, but it wouldn't be used by Intel. The processor had
already been developed with the equipment that was there. So they had to have equipment ready tomatch our schedule of new technology or they had to wait typically three years and get on the next load.
And this was always a complicating feature because it was a change in the way the industry was
operating. We wouldn't always buy a better mousetrap. It would only be on occasions that we could get
one qualified for use in the next process.

Addison: I just wanted to move on to the wafer size transitions. IBM funded the 8-inch or 200-mm, andI'm told that Intel pretty much funded the 6-inch transition. Why did you feel that you had to do that?

Moore: Wafer size changes turned out to be pretty tough, but the advantages after you've successfully
moved to a larger wafer are pretty great. We were setting up a new plant. That was the first one in
Albuquerque, really, first big one. And we thought that 6-inch was the way we ought to go. But it requires
debugging an entire generation of equipment to go to the next level. And that was quite expensive andwe weren't ready to take it on again at the 8-inch, which was not much later in time. But fortunately, otherpeople did. We moved to the 8-inch and are now barely doing 12-inch. I continually am amazed at how
big the wafers have gotten. I don't believe that I was convinced we'd go beyond about 6 inches for a longtime.

Addison: So you never considered putting up the money for the 200-mm transition? You wanted
somebody else to do that?

Moore: We were not ready to do it. It was probably something at that time where the memory
manufacturers would benefit more than we would. We would have done it if nobody else had, but
fortunately, somebody else stepped up to do it.

Addison: Another question that I came up with was about the silicon cycles. Did you have a strategy tosurvive those at Intel?

Moore: The silicon cycles?

Addison: Yeah, the silicon cycles, the up and down.

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Moore: The thing you learn in this industry fairly early is it tends to have cycles. We certainly did
develop a strategy. The philosophy was: You never get well on the old products. These cycles for thedevice suppliers were generally price driven, not volume driven. In fact, if you plot the volume of devices,
you see very, very few dips and very mild ones. You plot the dollars and you see very wide fluctuations. I
know one case for example kind of etched in my mind, where Intel's most profitable product price fell 90
percent in nine months. While the industry's good at decreasing cost, it can't follow that kind of a curve.
So, this caused fairly abrupt dislocations, but that price never comes back up. You only get the increased
revenue by moving on to the next generation of products. So it's very important that you continue the
R&D investment across the bottom of the [cycles]. You'll always have to have the new things coming out
the other end. And this is something that tends to be counterintuitive to people used to operating in otherindustries where you cut your cost, which means often cutting development and one thing or other during
the recessionary periods and build them up again during the others. Here you can't do that. You have tokeep developing the new stuff. In fact, you even have to accelerate the development of the new stuff
across these negative periods.

Addison: Is there any opportunity to work with the equipment suppliers during those down periods?

Moore: There's an opportunity to work with them. The problem is that those are periods when you're
typically not putting in new capacity, at least not in any quantity. You're developing new products; you'redeveloping new technology. So, the equipment supplier suffers even worse than the device
manufacturer. Their order book often turns negative during that time because people start cancelingorders faster than the new ones are coming in. It reflects the problems that the semiconductor device
manufacturers have much more strongly on equipment manufacturers. And it could even be worse thanthat on some of the material suppliers. If you look at something that includes the desire to decrease
inventories during these periods, for example, the silicon suppliers may find they don't get any orders at
all for a while. It's the nature of this kind of industry where we each depend on somebody further back in
the line. The poor guy at the end of the chain gets really whipped during these recessions. You try to dosomething to make it at least so nobody dies during the period, that the companies are there when you
need them to come back, but it's pretty traumatic for everybody.

Addison: Did these cycles exist going back to the Fairchild days, for example? Was it the same thing?

Moore: Yeah, these cycles have existed about as long as the industry has. I remember them in theearly '60s. We weren't doing an awful lot of business back in the '50s, but they come. No two of them
are exactly alike, but the one characteristic they seem to share is price collapse.

Addison: So, Gordon, did you often visit the SEMICON shows? And if you did, was it useful having allof that under the one roof?

Moore: I didn't often visit them. I did certainly a few times. Again, I was getting farther away frommaking the decisions on this kind of stuff, so it wasn't so important that I looked at the equipment.
Certainly Intel had large gangs of people crawling all over the shows and looking at all the equipment thatwas coming out. It was very important that we kept track of what the industry was going to supply us
with.

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Addison: All right. Well, we'll move to the [Computer History] Museum sound bites. Just talking about
Moore's Law, how speculative were your early predictions that later became known as Moore’s Law.

Moore: The original paper, which Moore's Law got its name, made a prediction for ten years, that themost complex integrated circuits would go from about 60 components to something like 60 thousand, athousand-fold increase in complexity. That was a wild extrapolation of very little data. I was just trying to
get across the idea that integrated circuits were going to be the route to cheap electronics, something thatwas not clear at the time. And amazingly enough, that ten doublings in complexity that I predicted turned
out to be nine doublings, actually, pretty close, much closer than it had any basis to be. But it got thename Moore's Law, which has stuck to everything that changes exponentially ever since.

Addison: To what extent was it apparent to you that this almost infinite doubling was physicallypossible? Or put another way, when did you become aware of the durability of the Law?

Moore: The first prediction for 10 years was all I was willing to state. In 1975, I redid it, changed theslope, and again expected a decade or so to be all we were looking at. And in fact, we stayed on thatamazingly closely ever since. In fact, if anything, we've done better than my revised prediction in '75. But
some day, all exponentials on physical quantities predicted disaster. And we're getting pretty close tomolecular dimensions in the devices we're making now, and that's going to become a fundamental limit in
how we can continue to shrink things. So, it's going to change after another two or three process
generations -- I don't know exactly when.

Addison: Were you surprised by the success or the accuracy of your early predictions?

Moore: I was surprised. There was no reason, really, to believe quantitatively that it was going to be thatclose. Now we're at the point where people in the industry recognize they have to move that fast or theyfall behind. It's a funny industry. The next generation of technology gives you performance
improvements, reliability improvements and cost improvements simultaneously. If you fall behind theleading edge on the kind of products that need it, you fall behind on all fronts. So it's very important forparticipants to stay on that leading edge.

Addison: In that similar vein, how extraordinary do you think semiconductor price performance iscompared with other technologies, and is it accidental or a forced outcome as a result of this investment
to keep up?

Moore: The price performance improvements applied by the semiconductor industry have driven most ofmodern electronics. You can look at other places where you get the same kind of thing, for example, disk
storage, which is nicely complementary to the semiconductor devices. But over long periods of time, it's
hard to see any technology that has remotely given the same kind of cost reduction. The only one that I
can point to, perhaps, is printing, where the first Gutenberg press kind of letters must have cost theequivalent of a few dollars a character, and now you get the New York Times on Sunday with lots ofcharacters for a few dollars. But the semiconductor industry has made bigger changes in a few decades
than printing has over a few centuries. It's a marvelous technology where the characteristics are driven
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rate, you'd be getting a million miles a gallon and so forth today. Somebody once pointed out to me fromthe audience, "But, yeah, the car would only be 2 inches long and half an inch high, not very good foryour morning commute."

Addison: All right. Our next topic is the integrated circuit. Again, when I talked to Jay Last, he recalledthat most people at Fairchild at the time viewed the IC as a research curiosity. When did it become
apparent to you that it was going to be something big?

Moore: His "most people" must address a different population than mine. I don't think we considered it aresearch curiosity. We considered it a product. And when we did the first integrated circuits and moved
them on into engineering and production, I remember assembling a group in the laboratory and saying,"Okay, we've done integrated circuits; now what'll we do next?” We started looking at other physicalphenomena and the like. But we still had work going on in integrated circuits. At that time, I don't think I
had the vision to see how far this could go, but it was only a couple of years after that that I published theMoore's Law paper. So we were beginning to appreciate that this could be really a majorchange…particularly the cost, but [also] in the nature of the electronics industry.

Addison: Were there any early applications of the IC that surprised you?

Moore: The early ICs were expensive and could only go in applications where weight or volume wasextremely important. These tended to be military, NASA and aerospace applications in general. So, theearly applications there didn't surprise me. Now, if you change the question to early applications of the
microprocessor, then my answer is completely different. The first microprocessors after the calculator
went to a variety of funny applications. The one that stands out in my memory was somebody automateda hen house, taking advantage of the fact it was a computer you could program to do the things you want.
Now, I don't know what you do when you automate a hen house, but I remember that that was a peculiar
application. In fact, I remember a board meeting where one of the [Intel] board members asked when wewere looking at applications of the early microprocessor, "When are you going to get a customer that I've
heard of?" The people buying these were startup companies, were obscure little operations. They
weren't the Fortune 500 that they sell to today.

Addison: At Fairchild, did you design ICs that would have wide appeal or applicability or were they
designed for a very narrow purpose, like defense or NASA?

Moore: No. The integrated circuits we designed at Fairchild initially were general purpose logic circuits
we expected people to use to build computers and computer-like systems. Then we started doing linear
circuits that were fairly broadly applicable. It was only when we got specifically into a major program like
Minuteman-II that the circuits were designed very specifically for a particular application. But that was
one program. We were still doing general purpose …circuits with most of our development capability.

Addison: This is a what-if: Had there been better theoretical understanding, could the technology haveskipped over vacuum tubes completely and moved directly from the early solid state research of the
1930s to transistors?

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Oral History of Gordon Moore
Moore: Sure. If vacuum tubes hadn't been invented and the transistor had been, that would be acompletely acceptable path for most of the things we want to do. There are still places where vacuum
tubes do things that we can't do with solid state. These tend to be high-power, some very high-frequency
applications. But otherwise, if electronics had grown up around the transistor rather than initially aroundthe vacuum tube, it probably would have been simpler in a lot of respects. It's just that getting the firstsolid state device -- it could be an amplifier -- took a lot longer than people expected, took a lot morematerial science. The actual idea of an MOS transistor was patented in the mid-'20s. You just couldn't
make it practically at that time.

Addison: All right. And just one last question, something completely different. Did you have any idols or
heroes when you were growing up?

Moore: You know, not especially that I recall. I had a couple of teachers in high school I was quite fondof who I thought were very good and tended to -- particularly my math teacher, who I thought gave me agood start there. I guess I can't really point to anyone in particular that I say was somebody I reallywanted to emulate.

Addison: All right. Well, thank you very much, Gordon.

Moore: Okay.

END OF INTERVIEW

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