March 3, 2005 – Gordon E. Moore, the chemical engineer who in 1968 co-founded Intel, spearheading decades of technological research and developments that made the company a leader in semiconductor manufacturing and technology, has been named the Marconi Society’s 2005 Lifetime Achievement recipient. The award will be presented on November 4, at the annual Marconi Society awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.
John Jay Iselin, president of the Marconi Society, credited Moore with “his innovative contribution to the technology that drives our daily lives, his entrepreneurial spirit and his devotion to the collaborative genius that inspired the genesis and success of Intel.”
Moore is widely known for his 1965 prediction that stated that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on an IC would double every year. In 1975, the timeline was updated to once every couple of years. Moore’s Law paved the way for semiconductor engineers to efficiently and inexpensively squeeze more transistors onto an IC to increase computing performance, creating a worldwide industry standard that has extended computing from the domain of the highly technical to the realm of the eminently practical.
“I am honored and delighted to receive the Marconi Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award and join those whose contributions have transformed the way people around the world communicate,” acknowledged Moore. “I believe society is at the beginning of this journey and that the impact of integrated circuits to the fields of computing and communications will positively affect our access to information and speed up our global understanding.”
The Marconi Society (formerly, the Marconi Foundation) is named for 1909 Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi, whose early experiments with Hertzian waves led to the wireless revolution of the 20th century. The Society is dedicated to nurturing, recognizing and celebrating individuals whose ingenious application of communications technology has had a positive and lasting impact on human progress around the globe.
Gordon Moore is the third person to receive the Marconi Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award during the organization’s 31-year history. In 2000, the award was presented to mathematician Claude E. Shannon, the founder of modern information theory who invented the concept of the bit, and in 2003, to William O. Baker, who, as director of research and later president of Bell Laboratories, oversaw the development of a wide array of technologies that earned its researchers eleven Nobel Prizes during his tenure at the helm.