A series of major semiconductor process development announcements over the past few weeks in the United States and Europe triggered shock waves in the electronics manufacturing landscape. In Silicon Valley, Intel's R&D investment in semiconductor process development yielded an announcement of an expected performance boost at the 45-nanometer node. The company will use high-k dielectrics and metal gates with a new hafnium-based material that it will apply to high-k films in gate-stack applications.

Not to be outdone, IBM, working on similar advances with Advanced Micro Devices, Sony and Toshiba, announced that it, too, has found a way to construct a critical transistor path for electrons, also using a new high-k/metal-gate material.

Together, these developments should lead to more-advanced semiconductor device circuitry. But the total R&D costs and capital investments required to reach and sustain those levels of technology improvement have become staggering.

This explains why more and more chip makers are going the "fab lite" route these days, outsourcing advanced semiconductor device and materials research and development tasks to third-party foundries in Asia.

But when it comes to companies that are attempting to control their own technology destiny, Intel and IBM appear to be the exceptions. Thus, I was unsurprised to hear that U.S. chip giant Texas Instruments has buckled under the capital and R&D strain, or that TI intends to halt internal process technology development at the 45-nanometer node and use foundry-supplied processes at 32 nm and beyond.

Intel and IBM notwithstanding, the financial community views research and development into semiconductor process development as an unsound investment in the future. And the "future" for Wall Street, of course, goes no further than the next quarterly earnings report.

Meanwhile, in places like Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai, the next financial horizon isn't a mere nanometer away. Their foundries, it seems, need only to wait for Western investment resolve to flag.

The modern electronics miracle is built upon the principle that innovation, and any differentiation worth its salt, is gained at the process technology level, where the silicon meets the dielectrics. Process development and manufacturing are inextricably linked. That's why it's all going over there.

Time. It's not on our side.