But the stakes have only grown larger in recent years. Electronics research-basic research, the stuff that isn't initiated by a marketing study-has become endangered from loss of habitat. Much used to be financed by the government. Universities did research: the kind where professors attempted to extend the boundaries of knowledge in directions other than toward the doors of the venture capitalists, and graduate students sought to work on unique questions unrelated to their professors' consulting practices. Even public corporations did research.

The range of the endangered research critter has been reduced to a tiny few organizations within giant corporations. IBM, Lucent and Intel come to mind. Perhaps they are the only ones that do.

Now we are faced with questions about the survival of one of these last enclaves. What exactly will happen to Bell Labs? Most engineers seem unconcerned.

Yet, the fate of real research has an immediate consequence that arrives much faster than any hypothetical loss of productivity. This result lies in the structure of design teams on the most complex, chip-centric designs.

As a first approximation, there are two sorts of designers working on the front ends of chip designs. There are those who have a grasp of the entire design flow-from architecture to physical electronics-and have some sense, at various levels of abstraction, of what they are designing. And there are those whose participation in the process is linguistic rather than technical. For them, the design is in the HDL code and the language-bound processes to which it is subjected. Consistently successful design requires a blend of the two types of designers.

The problem is that the former category-designers whose views encompass the whole range of abstractions-can come only from environments in which proximity, peer interaction and the lack of obstructive secrecy permit them to experience the whole process. That, for the most part, means the research centers. End the research and we cut off the incubation of the very designers who are essential to advances in design for the rest of us. It is a hard risk to quantify but a dangerous one to take.