After vacillating about the role that foundries play in its strategy, Motorola Inc. said it would pursue an "asset lite" strategy and rely on foundries for an unspecified portion of its manufacturing. Then Agere Systems said it was putting its Orlando fab up for sale, hoping for a buyer that would supply Agere from the same fab.

Researchers at Bell Labs-where the semiconductor industry got its start 54 years ago-have been developing process technologies at Chartered Semiconductor Ltd. Whether Bell Labs survives as a center of scientific inquiry into solid-state electronics is an open question.

Then AMD announced it would work with United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC; Hsinchu, Taiwan) to develop the 65-nm node. The pair hopes to start manufacturing in 2005 at a 300-mm fab the companies will build in Singapore, which offers generous government subsidies for chip makers there.

And as fabrication goes, process development will surely follow.

Fabs, of course, are supported by highly paid scientists and engineers who develop process flows. Equipment companies and other support functions cluster around fabs, creating thousands of highly skilled jobs.

To be sure, Motorola and AMD continue to operate fabs, and they may decide to build more. And executives at both companies have said that they will not pull back support for R&D. But many worry that those dollars increasingly will focus on narrow research goals that may benefit Motorola's wireless business, for example.

Two meetings have been held recently, with U.S. government participation or sponsorship, to consider the future of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

A fairly large group, including staff from a range of public agencies and research managers from the largest U.S. semiconductor companies, met at the Harvard Business School.

At a meeting in Tysons Corner, Va., sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most heavily debated topic was the role China will play. The EE departments at the best universities in China attract the brightest minds, and the education they get rivals that of any other country in Asia.

While U.S. students shy away from engineering and manufacturing jobs in particular, China is nurturing tomorrow's leaders in a key industry.

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