SAN FRANCISCO — The march of progress in electronics will slow to a crawl unless industry, government and universities work together to improve design productivity, the chairman of Sematech, William Spencer, said in a keynote address today at the 35th Design Automation Conference.

Spencer, in the first of two keynote addresses scheduled here for DAC, said that while annual productivity gains will continue for the next few years, they won't continue indefinitely without the industry's attention.

"Sometime in the future, this curve is going to flatten," he told a crowd of more than 500 at the Moscone Convention Center. "This productivity can't happen indefinitely."

The semiconductor industry has enjoyed an average 25-to-30 percent improvement in cost over the years, thanks to improvements in tools, equipment throughput, material costs and wafer size. Various efforts to stretch optical lithography will keep productivity advancing, Spencer said, but at some point new techniques and processes will be needed as gate oxides thin to only several atomic layers.

Throwing more people at the problem at a design-project level won't necessarily be the answer, because design teams of over 200 people can be difficult if not impossible to manage, Spencer said.

He called on design-automation vendors to adopt an open-systems approach to data exchange protocols.

"We need a strong, bottoms-up push on this," Spencer said. Tools are going to have to share data better."

He also said that the industry has to do a better job of getting its best people to spend two or three years working on research projects at universities — and to overcome the conventional fear among engineers that doing so will hamper their careers.