Ireland’s population is about 4 million, with Dublin, at 1.2 million, by far the largest city. Demographically, it’s one of the youngest countries in Europe, with more than half of its population less than 25 years of age. Just try walking down Grafton Street, one of Dublin’s pedestrian shopping hubs, without spotting a remarkable number of baby strollers. What attracts and holds this young population?

Ireland boasts seven universities, all public, and all providing a university education that’s currently free. The Irish government, through its investment arm, Enterprise Ireland, has committed to funneling public research money into its universities and then serving as a conduit to overseas companies as well as homegrown Irish start-ups to provide well-paying jobs to its people.

Ireland’s history of government-driven research goes back a generation, when University College Cork installed a 4-in.-wafer fab. Keep in mind that, back in the 1980s, you could not consider an organization without a foundry a viable player in electronics. Fast-forward to 2008, when the days of “real men have fab lines” are long gone: Keeping up with the Asian foundries is a game that few multinationals, let alone small countries, choose to play. However, Ireland has seized upon at least two technologies that exploit its expertise in silicon-based technologies: MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and mixed-signal power.

These technologies exploit not only the capabilities of the foundry but also the creativity of the foundry managers and professors. University College Cork’s MEMS facility, which the Tyndall National Institute now administers, leveraged its experience with silicon etching to develop silicon microneedles that can more effectively deliver drugs and therapeutic treatment transdermally. These microneedles are examples of MEMS that make good use of older silicon-wafer facilities. The university has licensed the technology to a US pharmaceutical company.

Continuing with the goal of leveraging expertise in growing fields, Tyndall researchers looked for a likely technology driver for the next generation of electronic products and realized that power processing—the conversion, regulation, and delivery of power within a system—could play almost as big a role as digital processing in enabling the products of the future. Tyndall Professor Cian Ó Mathúna, PhD, has argued for years that the direction power would take in systems ranging from servers to cell phones would make necessary a power supply on a chip.

The technology challenges of implementing power supplies on chips include the speed and cost of the switching semiconductors, as well as the size, efficiency, and cost of the power magnetics. With recent advances in viable high-speed switching devices and Tyndall’s and others’ success with developing microinductors, the timing was right for the Power SOC Workshop, held in September in Cork, Ireland. Conference attendees included engineers from companies such as Intel, On Semiconductor, and Analog Devices, as well as professors and graduate students from the engineering departments of universities such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, and the University of California—Berkeley, as well as from Asian and European universities. The attendees could see for themselves the level of research and assets the Irish universities and Enterprise Ireland are willing to invest in a highly targeted technology area. The conference served as a showcase for Irish-government-backed research and the subsequent migration of the research into industry. As governments worldwide struggle with encouraging research and industry, Ireland shows one successful approach.