America needs research funding — now - Chief Concern - Brief Article

Chief Executive, The, March, 2002 by Craig R. Barrett

Basic research--the pure, fundamental research that leads to the development of new technologies -- is in trouble in the United States. To maintain U.S. leadership in defining the future of technology, we must improve the quality of education and provide critical funding.

Our institutions of higher education are important sources of value to the economy. Job, product and wealth creation often come directly out of ideas and research collaborations at our universities. Silicon Valley is evidence of how well this system can work.

Currently, U.S. universities and colleges conduct about 48 percent of all basic research in the country, and the federal government funds nearly half of that. In the past 10 years, the majority of increases in federal and state support for basic research have been in medicine and the life sciences. For the physical sciences and for computer science and engineering -- drivers of the primary technologies for the past 20 years -- basic research funding has gone down, in some fields by more than 20 percent over the decade.

Increasingly, some of the best technical talent comes from outside the U.S. In our graduate schools, foreign nationals earn about half of engineering Ph.D.s, and almost as many math and computer science doctorates.

Yet, even with these foreign students, the number of electrical, computer and system engineers graduating from our universities has declined by 20 percent. And many who do receive their advanced degrees in these fields in American universities -- students from emerging economies such as Taiwan, South Korea, China and India-are increasingly electing to return home after they complete their education.

Intel is a global company. About two-thirds of our sales and about one-third of employees are outside the U.S. We need students educated in the physical sciences and engineering to do applied research and create next-generation products. If the U.S. can't create the technical talent Intel needs, we'll chase it wherever it may be -- whether in India, China, Latin America or Russia.

The federal government has a responsibility to support basic research, which means supporting university research. The Department of Defense was once a primary source of direct funding for university research. But as DOD's research funds decreased from their 1987 peak of $52 billion to a low of $39 billion in 1995 through 1998, discretionary funds have declined.

With less funding coming from the federal government, basic research organizations have bad to turn to private industry, which now provides a large portion of basic research funding m areas such as electronics and chip design. When the U.S. government stopped funding the National Labs for future lithography research, Intel and other semiconductor companies began financing this initiative. Today the private sector has spent more than $250 million to continue this effort.

Intel contributes more than $120 million a year to support education programs from the K-12 through the graduate level. We fund more than 300 research projects at more than 92 universities worldwide. We also have established the Intel Research Labs -- a group of research facilities adjacent to the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington -- which foster closer collaboration between university researchers and Intel. These research programs, along with Intel's internal efforts, have yielded technologies used throughout the computer industry and opened doors for longer-term relationships with universities.

The government must understand that research done today will impact the computing and communications industries 10 years from now. Without this research and without these highly trained students, the U.S. could cease to be the world's leader in science and technology while the center of economic and military power moves overseas.

The global economy is increasingly a knowledge-based economy. What will matter most for our future is the knowledge embedded in our workforce -- knowledge gained in significant part from our premier knowledge factories, the research universities.

Craig Barrett is president and CEO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker Intel, with 2001 sales of $26.5 billion. Send comments to chiefconcern@chiefexecutive.net.