Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corp. and an innovator in the semiconductor industry whose "Moore's Law" prophesied a constant increase in computing power, breathed his last on Friday at the age of 94, the company said.

He breathed his last at his home in Hawaii surrounded by family, according to Intel and Moore's family's philanthropic foundation.

Moore was the rolled-up-sleeves engineer in a triumvirate of technical luminaries that placed "Intel Inside" processors in more than 80% of the personal computers in the world after co-founding Intel in 1968.

Moore remarked in a 1965 article that the number of transistors on microchips had approximately doubled annually since integrated circuits were introduced a few years back.

His forecast of the trend's continuation became known as "Moore's Law" and, later revised to every two years, it pushed Intel and competitor chipmakers to aggressively target their R&D resources to make certain that rule of thumb came true.

Moore noted in his paper, published more than 40 years before Apple introduced the iPhone, that integrated circuits would lead to such marvels as home computers or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for cars, and personal portable communications equipment.

After Moore's note, chips gradually became more improved and cost-effective, driving much of the global technological advance over the past 50 years and enabling the development of home computers and the internet and Silicon Valley pundits like Google, Apple, and Facebook.

Moore once admitted to Forbes magazine that despite foreseeing the PC movement, he did not purchase a home computer until the late 1980s.

Moore being a native of San Francisco, obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry and physics in 1954 from the California Institute of Technology.

He started working at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, where he met Robert Noyce, who later became the co-founder of Intel. They left the "traitorous eight" to find Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Moore and Noyce quit Fairchild in 1968 to found Integrated Electronics, a memory chip company that would soon become known as Intel.