Sitting on a panel in front of 350 technologists at the MEDEA+ Forum in Monte Carlo, I was suddenly asked a question of which I had less than five minutes notice.
The question was: should pan-European R&D programmes, like MEDEA+, invite participants from other regions like China, the USA and Korea.
Thinking fast I stumbled out with the view that it might be useful to invite the USA but, seeing that neither China nor Korea had a university rated among the top 200 universities in the world, their participation was probably not going to add a lot.
The truth is that Europe and the USA are level-pegging in microelectronics R&D these days with the rest of the world lagging.
IMEC and the Albany cluster are neck-and-neck on EUV (with Japan a year behind, and they are much-of-a-muchness on 45nm.
Some would say IMEC has the advantage in terms of having a more catholic input of view, while Albany is dominated by IBM, but Albany can probably out-gun IMEC in the scale of its finance.
The opening afternoon of the 2006 MEDEA+ Forum, the best attended forum ever, took place on a warm, sunny, shirt-sleevey sort of day, and ended with a slap-up meal at Monte Carlo’s poshest hotel, the Hotel de Paris.
A word of warning. If you’re ever having rack of lamb at the Hotel de Paris, don’t bother to ask for mint sauce. They haven’t got any.
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