GORDON MOORE

GORDON MOORE – ROBERT NOYCE – ANDREW GROVE 

MIKROPROSESOR INTEL

                As the head of a company worth $ 16.2 billion in charge of employees 26,000 people, Andrew Grove, Intel Corporation's chief executive officer, still has a view of the entrepreneur. "The best thing is to make the right decision. Making the wrong decision is also okay. The worst thing to do is protect yourself from possible losses. Such action is a failure. Intel does not have to protect yourself from possible loss or fear of taking risks.

Since its inception the company continues to vigorously advance into new territory. In 1968, when Gorden Moore and Robert Noyce left the security of a large corporation established to start their own companies, their plans are not yet memabrikkan one product that they created: a semiconductor chip mini with the same ability to store the computer's memory with a magnetic core used in large mainframe computers.

Under the leadership of Moore and Noyce, Intel's engineers began to resemble more and more computer power in a smaller chip. In 1971 they made a piece of chip that can be active in computer operation. Microprocessors, as it was then called, is a tool which now ranks with the same McCormick reapers and Henry Ford's assembly line as a milestone in the history of the creation of gauges.

By creating a compact computer power into a 3000 square foot piece of a chip smaller than a fingernail, Intel microprocessors can be made possible personal computers (PCs). While the PC revolution gained momentum in early 1980, Robert Noyce (who died in 1990) commented that "the changes brought about by Intel's happening in our society."

Before beginning the creation of the microprocessor. Intel, the technology leader early, doing his best efforts to maintain its leadership. With the help of Andrew Grove, the kinetic managers and experts think the organization, the company managed to stay ahead of potential competitors for twenty years. Even after establishing the manufacture of microprocessors, which are produced in modern factories around the world, as an industry, Intel continues to operate as a research institution. In recent years the annual budget for research and development culminated in $ 1 billion.

Heavy emphasis on research is described by two widely quoted comments of each by Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove. The first, which is now known as "Moore's Law," is that "the power and complexity of silicon chips will double every eighteen months. The second, which explains the push Intel to be in front of each silicon chip to achieve kemanjuan, could be called "the statement Grove": "only the paranoid person that will be sustainable."

Gordon Moore grew up in a small coastal town south of San Francisco, where his father was a deputy sheriff and his mother run the store.

He left his hometown for the demands of education completed in 1954 with a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology. In 1956, after two years of work in the Physical Laboratory. Applied at Johns Hopkins, Moore returned to California, where he took a job as a research chemist at the Shockley Semiconductor. One colleague was Robert Noyce, Grinnell college graduate with a Ph.D. in engineering. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shockley Semiconductor should be an interesting place to work; this is a research group with sufficient funds operated by William Shockey, who won the Nobel prize in 1956 for his role in creating transistors. Impulses by passing through a "semiconductor" is pressed between two pieces, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in electronics, radio paved the way for the creation of smaller size. This breakthrough will eventually pave the way towards making a personal computer.

In 1956-57, scientists at Shockley Semiconductor to allow experiments that are beyond the reach of the transistor, to investigate the efficiency of its use in the manufacture of machinery and electronics smallother. But they suffered under the tyranny of Shockley. When Noyce, Moore, and half a dozen others were very disappointed with the administration of Shockley, they tried to enlist the help of the Arthur Rock, an investment banker with offices in San Francisco. He arranged for them in touch with Fairchild Camera and Instrumental Corporation, a large firm in New York, which agreed to launch a new division dedicated to semiconductor research. Fairchild Semiconductor when it opened in 1957 in Mountain View, California, with Noyce and Moore as division manager as manager of engineering, it is a second group of semiconductor research in the area that became known as Silicon Valley.

Noyce was a brilliant creator, in 1959 he successfully tested a single integrated circuit: he is testing an integrated circuit: he combines all of the electrical pathways are many transistors on a piece of silicon chip. In the not too long, Fairchild Semiconductor integrated circuit to replace electromechanical switches that run computers and other machines. By assuming that this is just the beginning of a broad-scale reduction, Gordon Moore imagining new possibilities that are not inexhaustible. If the transistor circuits can be made so that at the silicon chip, he considered, many ways could be found to double the ability of a piece of chip-and likely to double again.

Intel was founded as a company on July 18, 1968, under the name NM Electronics (NM stands for the "Noyce" and "Moore"). Rock became Chairman of the Board of Directors, Noyce served as president and CEO, and Moore as executive vice president. They set up shop in Mountain View, California, just down the street from Fairchild Semiconductor, and Stanford University. After recruiting about half a dozen employees of Fairchild, including Andrew Grove, they started to fill a small corner but ends up creating a new industry. "Business is no semiconductor memory," says Noyce. "That is the key to the survival of a young company. We tried to enter the business the less populated or not populated at all. "

Although the first product was a huge success, Intel managers realize that the company is still far from realizing the goal to achieve annual revenues of $ 25 million. "Many things may be accomplished technologically, but the only product able to achieve economic success, which will be a reality," says Noyce.

From the beginning, manufacturing silicon chips is very complicated. In the early seventies the plant will reduce the design through photography, and then print it on a small piece of silicon. This process is repeated many times to pack thousands of transistors on a piece of chip. Chip production is very expensive, and technological breakthroughs to be sluggish if Intel did not design the way, at every stage, to produce the chip at a rate of speed that can be achieved.

Grove, who in his mind have the industry organization, was given the task of helping to lead the production and direction of the company's initial experimentation with the assembly line. "Fabricating this area looks like Willy Wonka factory, with hoses, cables and network devices are running with the sound of pounding," Grove recalled. Intel's early years is only a prelude to the breakthroughs that will launch the company's growth and spread of personal computers in the 1970s. Creation is a microprocessor, called Gorden Moore "one of the most revolutionary product in the history of mankind." This discovery is not an event that counts, but only one logical step in Intel's efforts are ongoing to make the chip more cleverly and reduce the size of the tool give strength to the functional capability of the computer.

In 1969 a Japanese company asked Intel to produce chip circuits that will allow hand-held calculator can perform complicated matter that can only be done by calculating machine or a larger computer. Many diagnostic chip instead put side by side, Intel engineer Ted Hoff happen to get the idea of ​​using four chips that are interconnected, with one powerful chip in the middle.

In this process, Hoff devise a method to put the whole "cental processing unit" (CPU) on a single chip. And a single-chip solution is one that is not unexpected to meet the demand of a customer into the Intel 4004 microprocessor. In a graphic illustration of Moore's Law, Intel 4004, which is no larger than a caterpillar with the foot flat-packed metal with 2300 transistors and contained as much as the power function of the ENIAC computer in 1946, the first electronic computer, which filled the area of ​​3000 square feet. The chip is worth $ 200, which was introduced in 1971, to complete the operation yagn amazing 60 000 in just one second.

Consumer electronics products such as the Altair and the TRS-80 became popular immediately, and each one uses a piece of Intel chips. Until 1978, after the company introduced the 8086 chip, Intel's revenue of nearly $ 400 million.

In the 1970s changed into a giant Intel. Revenues increased from $ 4.2 million in 1970 to $ 661 million in 1979, a year when the company holds 40 percent of the microprocessor market is worth $ 820 million. Until 1980 its shares rose 10,000 percent of the original offering price of $ 32.50 per share. Without long-term debt and market dominant position in the assisted creation, Intel feel secure its place in the industry. But company leaders feel that they are just beginning to realize the possibilities of this technology.

By inserting the functions of the computer more and more capabilities into the silicon chip, they believe that a single chip will be able to hold the same power to the mainframe, a great work computer, which is mainly produced by IBM, prompting most of the large-scale business ventures.

However Intel pioneers who dared challenge it will face unexpected. Size and tradition will not guarantee the future of the company in the computer market is rapidly shifting. As written by Howard Rudnitsky in Forbes about the semiconductor industry in 1980: "still competitive merciless but the more capital-intensive and complicated, no longer a business where you can get started in a garage with a capital of $ 100,000 or play elsewhere massively- even if you're an Intel, with $ 66 million a year in R & D and $ 150 million in capital expenditures. "

Introduction of the IBM personal computer changed the world of computers. With the support sepergi giant "Big Blue," a personal computer, a machine with a "brain" and memory-is fast becoming a hot product for individuals and businesses. IBM-PC instantly Intel 8086 chip set as the industry standard. Because IBM does not develop many specific technologies associated with PCs, these companies can emulate a PC without too much difficulty.

Although Moore and Noyce stay on top of Intel, Andrew Grove is a driving force behind the company's strong expansion, having appointed president and chief operating officer in 1979. Grove that his firm and have a strong urge that this extraordinary dberi nickname "General Prusis." He was known as someone who keeps a list of workers who came after eight o'clock, and in 1981, when the company experienced difficulties in the recession, he produces "125 percent solution". All professional employees are forced to work fifty hours a week without any increase in wages.

Intel has difficulty in maintaining its dominance in the 1980s. Because the barriers to entering the microprocessor industry is very high, companies are trying to seize a broad point of Intel's market advantage is usually large corporations with a fat wallet: Texas Instruments, Motorola, and a growing number of Japanese companies.

Intel salvation comes - as it always did - through the creation of a new product that makes its own previous standards, and standards of all the competitors, was not fast enough anymore. In October 1985 Intel introduced the microprocessor 386, which developed it cost more than $ 100 million. "As a miracle of miniaturization, microprocessor, measuring ¼ inch square, but do to work with the same power and speed with many full-size computer," Forbes reported in June 1986.