An Interview with Gordon Moore

Cervantes: Do you follow anything like a general philosophy on life?

Moore: Probably not. I am not very good at long range planning of my life. I generally let other people control my calendar. I let my calendar get filled up with what everyone else wants and then look into next year to see when I want to schedule a vacation.

I am not very good at long range planning of my life. I generally let other people control my calendar.

So maybe that is a philosophy of life. I tend to be pragmatic, to try to do what is going to work.

Wolfson: What kind of advice do you have for young people who might want to get into the technology field, as far as fields of study? Do you recommend science and business, or literature or whatever?
Moore: The easiest route into the high tech industry is through the technical area, because we hire 10 people with a technical education for every one with a business education.
I think that if there is one subject where what you learn this year builds on what you learned last year, it is math.
To get a technical education requires that you take the right courses early, and that is particularly true with respect to math. I think that if there is one subject where what you learn this year builds on what you learned last year, it is math. If you skip a few years along the way - you decide that two years of math in high school is all you want to fool with - then you try to get back into the technical area, you will find it extremely difficult.
Then I think the other courses you generally find interesting are appropriate. Computer literacy was something that was not important when I went to school. It is important that you get a good grounding in communication skills. That means that you study English, that you read and that you write. Those are important skills that tend to atrophy in the days of television.

Certainly, there are many opportunities today for people trained in business schools, but often there you need the same kind of background that you need for the technical area; the math is still important, logical thinking, good communication skills.

Wolfson: Beyond the skills themselves, what do you look for when you you hire? You have two candidates for a job, they both have 4.0 averages, and great skills.
Moore:
It depends on what kind of position you are putting them in. In the technical areas, so much is now large team efforts. The projects are so complex, the individual engineer can't do it by himself. Some of our designs may have 300 or 400 engineers working on it together, so teamwork becomes extremely important. You like to see people who can communicate, who are comfortable working with other people, are not loners who have to go out and do it all themselves.

Now, of course, some of the most important things are done by the occasional 'wild duck' who can work by himself and sees a different approach. But that is less what we look for when we are hiring people into a company like Intel.

Cervantes: Where do you see technology headed in the next century?
Moore: Century ? Gee, I'm still worried about the rest of this century.

I think that the technology that we have developed in the semiconductor industry is now a fundamental industrial technology, a way of building a lot of different things, other than just electronics.

Where do you see technology headed in the next century?
Century ? Gee, I'm still worried about the rest of this century.
Today, people are using the same techniques for building little machines, for example, little gears, motors, and the like, at a real microscopic scale.

You can build little chemical laboratories this way. They are doing blood analysis on a silicon chip on a silicon chip these days, building structures with proper little passageways within it.

When a drop of blood is placed on this chip, you can read out half a dozen of the main constituents of blood, in about 90 seconds. This is valuable in the medical field.

I am completely fascinated by biotechnology. The things we have learned about the way life works, over the last couple of decades, have just opened up all kinds of possibilities.

In a completely different vein, I am completely fascinated by biotechnology. The things we have learned about the way life works, over the last couple of decades, have just opened up all kinds of possibilities.

Now this is potentially a dangerous technology to some people, but to me it's just an opportunity to make great improvements.

And we are also approaching the limits of the atomic nature of matter. Materials are made of individual atoms and you have to have a lot of atoms for the material to behave properly.
Cervantes: Do you see computer chips moving more or less into the future at the same rapid acceleration rate that is happening right now ?
Moore: For a while. I can see another couple of generations of the process technology that carries us another 6 to 10 years at about the same slope.

On the other hand, we are beginning to approach some real limits, some of them are just technological. It gets difficult to make smaller and smaller structures. We just exhaust the capabilities of optical systems; we need something different to make them smaller yet.

And we are also approaching the limits of the atomic nature of matter. Materials are made of individual atoms and you have to have a lot of atoms for the material to behave properly.

Some of the films we are using in the devices now are only 10 molecular layers thick. We cannot make those much thinner and still have the materials work the way they do.

Maybe in 10 years, those kinds of problems are going to start increasingly to be a limitation. It will slow the rate of progress. It will not be like we hit a brick wall and stop, it just means maybe, rather than 3 years between generations of technology, it will take 4 or 5 years. But we will have plenty of room for innovation.

We cannot make those much thinner and still have the materials work the way they do.

We will have chips with several hundred million transistors on them and the creativity of our designers using that many transistors can carry the industry through rapid advances for another 20 years or more. There is a lot of room left.

Wolfson: What mistakes have you made? When you look back over your decades in the technology field, do you say, Oops! Missed that one?
Moore (laughs): Oh, I never make mistakes. Let's see. I had someone come to me in the fairly early days of the microprocessor with the idea for the home computer and proposing that this was something that Intel ought to do. I thought, gee, what is it good for? The housewife could put her recipes on it. What else? I didn't see that as a very practical deal. I couldn't imagine my wife sitting at the stove with her computer, trying to figure how much of something to put in it. So, I completely missed that one.
That's my $15 million watch, all the gold plate has worn off of it and the like. That's what it cost Intel to get into the watch business and then to get out.

We were the first company in the digital watch business, in fact I still wear my $15 million watch today. (He pulls up his sleeve and reveals an ordinary looking watch). That's my $15 million watch, all the gold plate has worn off of it and the like. That's what it cost Intel to get into the watch business and then to get out.

If everything you try works, then you are not trying hard enough.

But I tend not to worry about these things too much. If everything you try works, then you are not trying hard enough.

Wolfson: There is a sense about the technology field, that if you want to succeed, you better be willing to work really hard. Lots of long hours, to the point where you give up a normal life.
Moore: Well, I don't think it has to be true. I think that most start-ups, in particular, get to be pretty intense, the hours get long. They do not have to be the 100+ hours a week, you can get by with 70, probably.

Certainly, some of the top management people just drive themselves ferociously. I don't see how they do it. I have generally worked fairly hard, but I haven't worked as hard as many of these stories describe. My weeks have been more typically in the 50 to 60 hour range, as an average over a period of time.

I had someone come to me in the fairly early days of the microprocessor with the idea for the home computer and proposing that this was something that Intel ought to do. I thought, gee, what is it good for?

Much as I like e-mail and the ability to remain connected to what is going on, I think what it has really done is to let people work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. We give them the opportunity to work even longer hours than they were working before.

The time pressure that comes from the rate the technology is moving certainly adds to that, so there is the opportunity to work especially long. But I don't think that it is generally necessary.

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