The good deal: in a world where collaborations between higher education and industry draw criticism, how is it that Marco and Berkeley's Gigascale Center thrive? - Research & Business

University Business, Oct, 2002 by David L. Kirp, Elizabeth Popp Berman

"Since the invention of the stirrup, the military has supported technology research," Maynard points out. "It's good at finding an idea whose time has come and shoving a lot of money at it." And so, by 1997, the idea for MARCO had taken shape--a national network of scientists working in university labs, engaged in long-term research projects that the industry and the federal government would underwrite.

WHY THE GIGASCALE CENTER THRIVES

It was a foregone conclusion that MARCO would look to Berkeley for both ideas and talent. Berkeley's graduate programs in engineering are currently ranked second by U.S. News & World Report, and its semiconductor research is widely regarded as without peer. And when MARCO was still on the drawing boards, says Dean of Engineering Richard Newton, Ph.D. '78, Berkeley's scientists were among the key figures doing the planning.

Yet despite the fact that the Gigascale Center received $7 million in industry money last year (about $2 million more than Novartis gave to the College of Natural Resources) and its corporate funders have at least as great a role in setting its agenda, the deal has gone virtually unnoticed outside a narrow circle of specialists. In part, that is because the Center has managed to avoid some of the risks associated with the Novartis agreement--that the university will depend too heavily on corporate funds or that a single company will have too much control over scientists' research.

By design, the Gigascale Center operates in an environment that minimizes intellectual secrecy. The sponsoring Silicon Valley companies are effectively paying membership dues to join an intellectual club where there are essentially no secrets and where everyone has a chance to learn from everyone else. The deal approximates what in high-tech circles is called "open source," a way of conducting research that has a long and fruitful history.

Take Berkeley's department of electrical engineering, says Newton. Its biggest successes have come from giving things away--most famously UNIX, the operating system upon which the Internet was built. Newton's favorite "giveaway" story concerns a program called SPICE. During the early 1970s, Berkeley's electrical engineers were developing circuit simulators to create a virtual chip that would obey all the rules of a real, physical chip, but at a fraction of the cost of actually building one. Graduate students in a class on circuit simulation devised a program that fit the bill. But because they feared the program might be used by the military, these pacifist students gave it an unappealing acronym: CANCER.

Fairchild Semiconductor secured an exclusive license to CANCER, but soon afterward the professor who launched the project decided to develop a similar program--one that anyone could use--and gave it the friendlier acronym SPICE. While companies could add proprietary material, SPICE's basic code had to remain public. The punch line is that while CANCER died at Fairchild, even today SPICE remains the basis for many circuit simulators.