As an aspiring engineer in an Illinois grad school during the 1970s, Mark Bohr dreamed of the sunny orchards near Stanford University and imagined a paradise for technologists.

“When we read about Silicon Valley and towns with names like Mountain View and Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, boy I really thought Silicon Valley was heaven,” Bohr recalls. “But frankly when I moved there, I learned that heaven was made out of concrete.”

So as farm towns near San Jose converted into a sea of office parks and expressways, Bohr fled north to Oregon. His new employer, Intel, had just opened a semiconductor factory amid the fields in Washington County.

Bohr became a charter member of Intel’s Portland Technology Group, the original name for the company’s Oregon research site. The small outpost grew to become Intel’s main research site worldwide as Bohr grew from a junior engineer to one of Intel’s top scientists.

With his colleagues, Bohr was responsible for generations of technological breakthrough. In 2007, The New York Times hailed him as one of the tech industry’s “unsung heroes.”

Bohr, who retires next month at age 65, has helped make computers smarter and faster, even as the features on the chips approached the atomic level. He and his colleagues pushed the boundaries of physics and enabled computers that grew exponentially more powerful even as they kept shrinking.

“No one has a track record of introducing so many successful (technology) nodes,” said Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of industry firm VLSI Research. He said Bohr was particularly skilled at marshalling expertise from across Intel to explore new frontiers in semiconductors.

“There’s no single researcher in the industry who has done it so long,” he said.

As Bohr leaves, though, Intel faces its greatest challenge in decades. The features on computer chips are so tiny that chipmakers are struggling to shrink them further, threatening the regular expansions in computing power that have sustained the entire tech industry for half a century.

“They’ve become really difficult,” Hutcheson said. “So he’s leaving at a good time.”

The Intel that hired Bohr in 1978 was just a decade old, helping create the technology that would eventually make computers pervasive. It was a brash upstart, a notoriously demanding and confrontational place.

“There may have been times when I first joined Intel where strong arguments in meetings, occasional table pounding, was common,” Bohr said. “That kind of confrontation, I think, has gone away. But another form of soft confrontation, I’ll call it that, still exists.

As technology matured he said Intel did, too. Chip technology grew too complex for any single engineer to master. Success required collaboration and an ability to listen to colleagues with complementary expertise.

“I now refer to innovation as a team sport,” Bohr said. “It’s not enough to have one or two bright engineers who think they’ve got the very best idea. You really have to be able to get the whole team to work together.”

Intel’s tiny outpost in Aloha grew into the company’s most advanced research sites, with its Washington County campuses employing 2,000 researchers holding Ph.Ds. Bohr isn’t among them. He never went back to school after earning his master’s in Illinois.

Instead, he learned on the job – inventing the science as he went along.

“That was my four decades of graduate research,” Bohr said. He said earning a Ph.D. demonstrates a degree of commitment and ambition, but his long career demonstrates there are other paths for the highly motivated.

“You have to have a thirst for success,” Bohr said. “You have to have a thirst to learn and improve and you have to get along well with other people.”

Mark Bohr Age: 65 Title: Senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration. Family: Married with two grown children. Background: Holds engineering degrees from the University of Illinois. Joined Intel in 1978 and moved to Oregon in 1979. Experience: Intel credits him with leading two major technological advances in semiconductor technology, the switch to new materials known as “high-k metal gate,” and “tri-gate” technology that added a third dimension to the standard transistor.

With measured words and understated manners, Bohr developed a reputation for clearly articulating the science behind semiconductors. Intel called on him to explain its innovations to its own executives, to investors and to President Barack Obama, who visited Intel’s Hillsboro research site in 2011.

Intel credits Bohr with leading development of two major breakthroughs in the past dozen years – an overhaul in the basic materials inside a microprocessor and an upheaval in transistor design that added a third dimension. Both extended Moore’s Law, the maxim coined by Intel founder Gordon Moore that predicts regular, exponential growth in computing power.

After years of pushing the laws of physics, though, physics has begun pushing back. Intel’s forthcoming generation of 10-nanometer microprocessors is years behind schedule. That’s a major lapse that enabled rivals to catch up – and in some cases surpass – Intel technology.

“We kind of overshot, I think, on our 10nm technology,” Bohr admits. He said the company was too aggressive in its goals for packing transistors onto computer chips.

“We bit off a little too much at that step,” he said. “Maybe we should have relaxed a bit in our goals and it would have been a much easier transition.”

Many observers have concluded Moore’s Law is at an end, that features on semiconductors are now so small that manufacturers can no longer wring more performance just by packing transistors together more densely.

But Bohr insists Intel has learned from its mistakes on 10nm, and that smarter design and new manufacturing tools will enable Intel to resume the pace of innovation.

“Yes, it looks harder every time but there are just too many bright people, too many bright engineers, working on it to let it stop,” Bohr said.

Those bright engineers won’t include Bohr. He said he began planning his retirement a year ago, realizing that in his four decades in Oregon he had spent so much time on his work he hadn’t properly explored the state. Bohr, who lives near Aloha, said he plans to hike, backpack and spend more time enjoying the city.

“It’s not amazing that the city of Portland has many interesting neighborhoods and restaurants. What I did find is amazing is to realize that I’ve been here 40 years and I’ve visited so little of that,” Bohr said.

He’s already reduced his schedule to three days a week, spending other days as a hospital volunteer assisting nurses by fetching supplies and running blood vials to the lab.

Never a futurist, Bohr admits he didn’t anticipate smartphones or social media and doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how the technologies he helped invent will be used. And he said it doesn’t seem like the people using those technologies spend a lot of time thinking about where they came from.

“Most people now see thin and light laptops and cellphones as a very common technology. It must be easy for the engineers to do this since I see so many of them and they get a little bit better every year,” Bohr said.

They don’t see how much work went into those devices, or the work of thousands of scientists around the work who made them possible.

“As much as I would like society to adore engineers, I don’t believe that’s ever going to happen,” Bohr said. “Sometimes we just work quietly in the background and that’s usually good enough for us.”

-- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699