The Dutch electronics giant has issued an open invitation for R&D "tenants" including academics, big corporations, small startups and Philips' own spin-offs, welcoming all of them to make use of the campus and its engineering resources. Philips sees this novel approach, which reflects a possibly permanent change in the way high-tech companies conduct corporate research, as an opportunity for its R&D teams to share ideas with some of the best minds in the business.

At a time when industrial researchers face budget cuts and are pressured to produce results for market-driven applications, Philips Research's move takes the common concept of collaborative research a step further. Acknowledging the difficulty of sustaining substantive R&D on their own, some companies "have gone halfway" by forging ties with other organizations, said Rick Harwig, chief executive officer of Philips Research, but nobody has gone as far as opening up a corporate research facility to other companies.

The research model of the High Tech Campus is analogous to the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) in Leuven, Belgium, Harwig said. "I would be proud if this eventually becomes an IMEC-like institute, although we need to do a lot more to call it that."

Philips' motivation, he said, is sharing costs and resources and keeping an eye out for future partners. As part of a lab share deal, Philips Research will offer external customers a variety of fee-paid services, including Philips' engineering expertise in clean room management, multitechnology integration, prototyping and pilot manufacturing. These services are projected as "a profit center" for Philips, Harwig said.

External customers that have established a presence at the High Tech Campus include litho equipment maker ASML; microfiltration specialist Fluxxion BV; Cytocentrics CCS GmbH, which makes chips for drug discovery; and the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter.

A marked shift within the European research community toward more focused, application-driven research figured into Philips Research's open invitation.

Werner Weber, senior director of corporate research at Infineon Technologies AG's laboratory for emerging technologies in Munich, Germany, said earlier this year that when his team is presented with an R&D topic such as ambient intelligence, it "starts with applications.

"We focus on applications and technologies that are too young to have a road map," he said. Rather than trying to develop everything from scratch, his team works with existing technologies and partners already familiar with them. "We figure out a way to combine them and collaborate with them so that services and good human interfaces come to the foreground."

Some wonder, however, if Europe has lost the balance between fundamental and applied research with its heavy emphasis on application-driven R&D. "Research out of our purely intellectual curiosity: We do less [of that] now," said Henk van Houten, senior vice president at Philips Research. "We think that's appropriate."

Philips executives said the conventional boundaries between basic vs. applied or "academic vs. industrial" research are no longer relevant. Multidisciplinary research is becoming the norm and research topics are getting more complex. The company has relied on a mix of physicists, chemists, biologists and electrical engineers to develop such innovations as electrowetting lenses, flexible organic displays and molecular medicine. "We start out with a great sense of urgency, and require multidisciplinary efforts to achieve something impossible but desperately needed by our customers," Harwig said, providing Philips' new definition of industrial research.

Europe's focus on application-driven research arises in part from its desire to lead the technology transition from microelectronics to nanoelectronics. Engineers involved in nanoelectronics or other broad research topics, such as ambient intelligence, say that strong partnerships with other industries — textiles, pharmaceuticals, plastics — are key to developing new fields of application.

At the Information Society Technology congress last week in Lyon, France, Dirk Beernaert, responsible for microsystems, nanosystems and displays at the European Commission, emphasized the importance of such cooperation, saying that the "smart technology" of the future goes beyond silicon. It's about "plastic-based micro/nanosystems, integrating nanodevices in various materials and in or on very large surfaces, interfacing with organic molecules and mixed-technology systems," he said.

Philips Research does not use the new clean room at its High Tech Campus for pure silicon process research, but for "experiments," said Harwig, including development of "biosensors, plastics, silicon insulators and others."

By keeping only the shell originally used for clean rooms, Philips Research completely upgraded the 2,650-square-meter facility with a $73 million investment, creating multitechnology, Class 100 to Class 1,000 clean rooms designed to handle everything from wet processing, lithography, deposition and plasma etching to e-beam, implanter, and measuring and inspection technologies.

Rent-a-room

Peter van Stiphout, chief of microsystems technology at Cytocentrics, said that he and two other individuals from his 15-person Reutlingen, Germany, startup are committed full-time to Philips' High Tech Campus. Cytocentrics, which is developing chips for high-throughput secondary screening, assay development and safety pharmacology, is paying Philips $122,000 per person per year to use the new clean room, he said. For an extra fee, Cytocentrics can also tap Philips' engineering resources. Van Stiphout said he likes the flexible rent-a-clean-room arrangement, which allows him to bring in his own equipment. But because the clean room is a shared space, his team must often deal with surprises and unfamiliar tools, he said. "It's not like we can just push one button for manufacturing."

Harwig declined to identify the Philips divisions or outsiders using the clean room, but said that "they differ in accordance with each company's project needs."