Moore's Law

What is this book about?

This is the authoritative biography of Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel and the quietest of Silicon Valley's founders. Its three authors bring deliberately mixed credentials: Arnold Thackray, a historian of chemistry and winner of the Dexter Award, the field's highest honour; David C. Brock, a historian of the semiconductor industry; and journalist Rachel Jones. Moore was trained as a chemist, and the book's distinguishing feature is precisely its materials angle on the chip industry, following him from Caltech and Johns Hopkins through Shockley Semiconductor and the Traitorous Eight at Fairchild to the founding of Intel in 1968. Despite the title, the law bearing his name occupies only a small part of the narrative; the real subject is a reserved, introverted scientist whose foresight and luck together shaped how Silicon Valley behaves.

Why read it?

Most accounts of Silicon Valley open with Jobs, with Musk or with venture capital, and therefore open with drama. This book tells the region's other main line: chemistry, materials and process. Moore is close to the only valley founder who built an industrial empire starting from laboratory science, and this is the best available account of where the industry's core conviction, that device performance is set by process and materials, actually comes from. It is also the clearest treatment of a widespread misunderstanding: Moore's law is an empirical observation married to a commercial expectation, and was never a law of physics.

Core Ideas

• Moore's law is a hybrid of empirical observation and commercial expectation. It began as a four-page magazine piece extrapolating cost and component density, was revised by Moore himself in 1975, and only afterwards hardened into the industry's self-fulfilling coordination device.
• Materials and process set device performance. Every step of transistor miniaturisation was a problem in solid-state physics, surface treatment and precision manufacturing rather than one of design alone, which is the real content of the silicon in Silicon Valley.
• Leadership by restraint. Moore's edge lay in judging technical direction and leaving capable people alone rather than in salesmanship, forming an early archetype of the valley's engineering culture and a sharp contrast with the celebrity founders who came later.
• Historical method applied to an industry usually served by mythology. Three authors trained in the history of science treat Silicon Valley as a subject for archival research, converting legend into something verifiable.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Why did a trend originally offered as a rough extrapolation survive for more than five decades and become the coordination device of an entire industry?
• What is genuinely scarce in semiconductors: design genius, or the systemic capacity to keep advancing materials, process and yield?

Who should read it?

People working in semiconductors and electronic materials, particularly in process, materials and packaging; anyone who wants to understand why Silicon Valley is named for silicon; and analysts or investors who must separate the physical content of Moore's law from its industrial function. No technical background is required, only interest in industrial history.

How to Read It

The Chinese edition was published by the Renmin University of China Press in 2017. Read first the chapters covering the original 1965 magazine piece and Moore's 1975 revision, to pin down exactly what the law asserts, before returning to the Fairchild and Intel founding narrative. Readers more drawn to materials and process detail can pair it with Crystal Fire, already in this library, which treats the same period from a different angle.