"We are entering a new golden age of research and development that will result in unprecedented breakthroughs in such areas as drug discovery, genomics, nanotechnology and supercomputing," Donofrio told the Tech Valley Summit. He noted that innovations are also going on in business processes and methodologies, making "the barriers of geography, time and finance irrelevant, fostering a robust and vibrant global ecosystem for discovery and innovation."

IBM spends $5.2 billion annually on research and development on such semiconductor replacement technologies as carbon nanotubes, quantum computing, spintronics and molecular computing. "The next innovations may not necessarily depend on the physical sciences," Donofrio said. "We may find a way to have computers 'sense' what designers want the computers to do, and the computers will go off and do it."

Pressing short-term concerns include finding ways to accommodate ever-higher levels of integration using traditional semiconductor scaling techniques. IBM's recent partnership between its Almaden Research Center and Stanford University to work together on spintronics is a short-term effort to harness power-hungry nanoscale semiconductors.

"In the future, I know that innovation will make a difference, but it will have to be a different kind of innovation", said Donofrio. "We have been saying that we will be running out of gas on CMOS technology for the last ten years and yet we have been able to sustain it through clever tweaks."

The IBM executive warned that the approach is losing steam and that industry needs to shift its focus to finding new materials, manufacturing techniques and educational approaches to science and engineering.

"We need to instill the notion of 'problem-based learning' into our curricula, and it has to start early in a child's education," said the 40-year IBM veteran. "We need to find the same innovative approach adopted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology when it introduced the first computer science course in an engineering program in the early 70s."

Computer science was originally taught along with physics as electronics emerged as a distinct discipline. Emerging technologies nanotechnology and the industry it is spawning are changing the way curricula are structured. Donofrio said innovation will flourish in the future at the crossroads of technology and business, citing IBM's Extreme Blue program as an example of the company's attempt to nurture next-generation technologists and leaders. The Extreme Blue program includes IBM-sponsored undergraduate and graduate interns working in small teams to conceive and deliver technology, a business plan and market strategy for an emerging technologies. MIT took its next step in "problem-solving learning" when it officially opened its Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences on Friday (May 7). The Center will conduct high-level research in computer science, linguistics and philosophy.

Donofrio, a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.) has been pushing his alma mater and other universities to adopt a more flexible approach to current engineering education. With that has also come the need to link academia and industry along with local governments to back nanotechnology research — a field requiring a multidisciplinary approach in its very early stage of development.

To that end,Albany NanoTech at the State University of New York (SUNY) here serves as an integration center for bringing together researchers and academia to work on nanoelectronics, nanosystems and nanophotonics. IBM and New York state have together contributed $2.5 billion to the center and surrounding research labs. IBM partners Infineon, Sony, Toshiba, Chartered Semiconductor and Samsung will share in the fruits of a 300-mm wafer fab in East Fishkill, N.Y.

Philips Semiconductor Fishkill also has its own 200-mm manufacturing facility on the IBM East Fishkill site that produces ICs for the wireless, consumer electronics and smart identification markets, Wendy Arienzo, director of engineering, told the summit.

IBM and its partners have invested $500 million on R&D in the region, according to John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive, for IBM's Technology, Systems and Technology Group. "We don't have all the answers, even though we are spending some $5 billion on R&D at IBM," said Kelly. "We are trying to create here the infrastructure for human intellectual capital and provide the conditions to attract it".

Kelly championed the selection of East Fishkill as the site for IBM's $2.5 billion, 300-mm plant. Critical research for work done at the plant is performed at the SUNY Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics here, which received $100 million from IBM. Kelly was also a key figure in helping to attract International Sematech North to Tech Valley, which subsequently attracted Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL) to locate at the NanoTech center.

The facility is TEL's first R&D center outside Japan. As part of the $300 million deal two years ago, funds were used to add 10,000 square feet for a 300-mm wafer clean room at the Albany NanoTech complex to accommodate more TEL researchers. "We will be doing research in the 45- and 32-nm semiconductor process regions to qualify our tools," said TEL President Barry Rapozo.

"We have two tools installed, and we'll be qualifying tools from our entire suite of six tool categories when we are fully deployed in mid-2005." Rapozo expects 50 more researchers to join the current 20 working at the TEL Technology Center America. "They will be assigned here in order to ease the transfer of technical knowledge from our Tokyo facilities. We want to be closer to our customers, and IBM is a large customer," said Rapozo.

The two-day summit served as the venue for enlisting support for Albany NanoTech and other businesses located in an 18-county region between New York City and the Canadian border, which is home to more than 1,000 technology companies with over 50,000 employees and $5 billion in economic impact on the region, said Lyn Taylor, president of the Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce.