SIA steps into research gap

San Jose, Calif. — Fears that the United States is liquidating its future in semiconductors by giving short shrift to research have ignited a major effort to turn the tide. Brian Halla, chairman and CEO of National Semiconductor Corp., said last week that the Semiconductor Industry Association has created a blue-ribbon committee to address the loss of research capability here.

Called the Committee on American Competitiveness, the SIA group consists of a half-dozen leading U.S. chip industry executives who will lobby for the need to boost overall competitiveness in the United States. Besides Halla, the members will include Intel chairman Craig Barrett; Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology; Rich Templeton, CEO of Texas Instruments; John Daane, CEO of Altera; and SIA president George Scalise. The committee will also launch a massive public relations campaign in a drive to raise awareness of the issue in government and among the public.

"It's time for the U.S. to wake up," said Halla in a keynote speech at the International Symposium on Semiconductor Manufacturing here. Warning that there is a necessary link between basic research and global competitiveness, he said that even the grim picture painted by the income statements of U.S. corporations is not dark enough to reflect the reality.

"We talk about R&D on our balance sheets," Halla said. "In reality, we're talking about 'D.' 'R' is happening less and less."

The exact goals of the SIA committee are still being hammered out. But it will attempt to boost funding for basic chip research at several organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and related entities, Halla said in an interview after the keynote.

Halla and other executives were due in Washington later last week to launch their lobbying effort.

Observers agree that economic pressures and shortsighted public policy have converged to create a shortfall between the basic research being conducted in the United States and the needs of U.S. industry. Ironically, the phenomenon has taken hold just as the industry bumps up against the limits of yesterday's basic research.

Arguably, much of today's chip industry is built on the windfalls from some fairly simple research into the electrical behavior of semiconductors. Subsequent projects have refined knowledge about semiconductor physics, but in most ways what the industry understands about materials and transistors hasn't changed in many years.

But now the problems are once again becoming fundamental. "What comes after the silicon transistor?" Stanford University president John L. Hennessy asked rhetorically during an interview. An electrical engineer and computer scientist, Hennessy was the founder of MIPS Computer Systems (now MIPS Technologies Inc.). "We know it won't last forever, but we don't know the answer [to what comes next]."