The co-founder of the US chip manufacturer Intel, Gordon Moore, has died at the age of 94. This was announced by the company on Friday. Moore was considered a pioneer of the semiconductor industry. Together with Robert Noyce, the American founded NM Electronics in 1968, which later became Intel. He was considered an energetic engineer. Under his and Noyce's leadership, Intel invented the microprocessors that paved the way for the personal computer (PC) revolution.

Together with his development team, he finally ensured that Intel processors were installed in more than 80 percent of all computers worldwide. "It's really nice to be in the right place at the right time," Moore said in a 2005 interview. "I was very fortunate to enter the semiconductor industry when it was still in its infancy. And I've had the opportunity to evolve from the time we couldn't make a single silicon transistor to the time we put 1.7 billion of them on a chip. It's been a phenomenal journey."

He is also known for his definition of Moore's Law. Moore, who had studied physics and chemistry in California and graduated with a doctorate, predicted as early as 1965 that the number of integrated circuits on the same area would double about every two years and was right to assume it. While the first transistor was the size of a matchbox in 1947, today there are tens of millions on the surface of a fingernail.

Thanks to Moore's prediction, computer chips have become exponentially more efficient and cheaper, as chipmakers subsequently increased their research and development resources to see if the law actually came true. Thus, not only the worldwide technological progress was promoted, but also the development of the Internet and the Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google was made possible.

Gordon Moore was executive president of Intel until 1975. From 1979 to 1987 he was Chairman and CEO and remained so until 1997. Moore was honored in 2002 by President George W. Bush with the "Medal of Freedom", the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2013, Forbes magazine estimated the entrepreneur's net worth at $4.1 billion.