Practical Chip Design

We commented recently on the migration of semiconductor R/D from the great private research laboratories such as the Bell and Watson Labs to industrial development centers and, it appears, from there into near extinction. At that time we pointed out that the semiconductor equipment industry has picked up a lot of the slack in process R/D and even in basic materials and physical optics research. A personnel announcement from Applied Materials today (see story here) nicely illustrates the point.

AMAT has hired Dr. Hans Stork as chief technology officer for their Silicon Systems Group. That in itself is not big news, as Dr. Stork is splendidly qualified for the role and is a great catch for AMAT. But as it happens, Stork’s curriculum vitae is almost an illustrated time line of the migration we have been discussing.

According to the press release, Stork began his industrial career in 1982 doing SiGe bipolar research and development at the TJ Watson research center of IBM. Just as the curtain was closing on the golden age of real industry-funded research, Stork moved into an R/D role in the considerably more product-focused Hewlett Packard Internet Systems and Storage Lab. From there, Stork moved to Texas Instruments, one of the last big IDMs, where he was CTO and senior vice president of Silicon Technology Development. And now he is in a similar role in an equipment company.

This evolution from research institution to systems house to semiconductor IDM to equipment company exactly traces the path of the center of effort of semiconductor research as it has migrated through the US economy. Sadly, each step in this migration has been driven not by the need to place research efforts where they can be the most effective, but by the demands for short-term operating results, making successive layers of US industry increasingly intolerant of long-term investment.