Gordon E. Moore, Intel Co-Founder Behind Moore’s Law, Dies at 94

Still, he saw the future. In 1963, while at Fairchild as director of research and development, Mr. Moore contributed a chapter to a book that described what was to become the precursor to his eponymous law, without the explicit numerical prediction. Two years later, he published an article in Electronics, a widely circulated trade magazine, titled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.”

“The article presented the same argument as the book chapter, with the addition of this explicitly numerical prediction,” said David Brock, a co-author of “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary” (2015).

There is little evidence that many people read the article when it was published, Mr. Brock said.

“He kept giving talks with these charts and plots, and people started using his slides and reproducing his graphs,” Mr. Brock said. “Then people saw the phenomenon happen. Silicon microchips got more complex, and their cost went down.”

In the 1960s, when Mr. Moore began in electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy more than 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars advanced as quickly as computers, “they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it. (Cars would also be a half an inch long.)”

Mr. Moore’s survivors include his wife; two sons, Kenneth and Steven; and four grandchildren.

In 2014, Forbes estimated Mr. Moore’s net worth at $7 billion. Yet he remained unprepossessing throughout his life, preferring tattered shirts and khakis to tailored suits. He shopped at Costco and kept a collection of fly lures and fishing reels on his office desk.

Moore’s Law is bound to reach its end, as engineers encounter some basic physical limits, as well as the extreme cost of building factories to achieve the next level of miniaturization. And in recent years, the pace of miniaturization has slowed.

Mr. Moore himself commented from time to time on the inevitable end of Moore’s Law. “It can’t continue forever,” he said in a 2005 interview with Techworld magazine. “The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.”

Holcomb B. Noble, a former science editor for The Times, died in 2017.