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Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary. By Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Pp. xxvii+530. $35.
The appearance of this book in 2015 was part of a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of a brief note, published in the trade journal Electronics, by chemist Gordon Moore, who at the time was working at the modest Northern California electronics firm Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. Moore's note contained a crude graph, based on four data points, which suggested that the number of "components per integrated function" was doubling every year into the foreseeable future. Moore was referring specifically to the kinds of products Fairchild was producing at the time. The company had developed a technique, the "planar process," for placing transistors, resistors, diodes, and other devices on a single chip of silicon. That process gave Fairchild an enormous advantage over the many competing methods of miniaturizing electronics then being explored.
That simple graph was the basis for "Moore's Law," now familiar to specialists and laypersons alike. It refers now to not only components on a chip, but also to semiconductor memory, disk storage, and the general metric of advances in digital microelectronics flooding modern society. The law is still holding as of this writing, if at a slightly slower pace.
Arnold Thackray, founder of the Chemical Heritage Foundation and a scholar whose works should be familiar to most readers of this journal, along with David C. Brock and Rachel Jones, have written a thorough narrative...