Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corporation, passed away on Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94. Moore was widely known for his 1965 prediction, which became known as Moore’s Law, in which he forecasted the exponential growth in the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip. His prediction held true for decades, and it ultimately enabled the development of the laptop computers, microprocessors, and other high-tech products that are ubiquitous today.

Moore was born in San Francisco in 1929 and grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal town south of San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in chemistry and went on to receive his doctorate from Caltech in 1954. After interviewing for a job with Dow Chemical, he was instead offered a position with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. He eventually joined William Shockley and a group of defectors to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which became a pioneer in manufacturing integrated circuits.

In 1968, Moore and Robert Noyce formed their own company, Intel Corporation, with an initial $500 investment. Intel soon became the most successful semiconductor company in history, and with his growing wealth, Moore also became a major figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a donation of 175 million Intel shares, and in 2001, they donated $600 million to the California Institute of Technology.

His Legacy: 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. However, Moore’s legacy will continue to live on in the technology that he helped create. His prediction in the 1960s about rapid advances in computer chip technology charted a course for the age of high tech, and has enabled the development of the laptop computers, microprocessors, and other high-tech products that are ubiquitous today.