Weakness in the integrated circuit area should be a cause for someconcern. Jamie Smyth reports.

The Republic has been ranked sixteenth in an European integrated circuit (IC) research league table despite the presence of some of the world's biggest computer chip firms in the Republic.

Integrated circuits, popularly known as chips, are electrical circuits that are created on a single slice of semiconductor material. These chips form the brains of electronic equipment including computers, mobile phones and a new generation of games consoles.

The league table - which was compiled by the European Commission's chip research initiative called Europractice - ranks states such as Sweden, Belgium and even Malta above the Republic.

The rankings are based on the number of integrated circuit designs that were manufactured or advised by the Europractice initiative between 1996 and 2002.

Europractice aims to help firms and educational institutions to design and manufacture integrated circuits. It provides technical services that enable firms to prototype designs without incurring the risks and costs associated with sophisticated integrated circuit design.

A second table prepared by Prof Phil Burton, director of the Electronic Product Development Centre at the University of Limerick, which measures the number of devices made on a proportional basis to the population, shows the Republic at seventh.

But Prof Burton, who heads the biggest integrated circuit design team in the Republic, says the figures are cause for concern given that the Government has targeted this area. "The relatively poor Irish performance is disturbing because Ireland has more than 10 multinationals in the semiconductor business," he says. "The inescapable conclusion is that the synergy that one might reasonably expect to occur between universities and the high-technology sector here is simply not happening."

Prof Burton says the problem is caused by multinationals preference for investing in academia in their home countries and a general weakness in the semiconductor technology research within Irish universities.

"Less than 10 academics in the Republic could design an integrated circuit from start to finish ... and money of course is at the root of much of the malaise."

Funding has been difficult to raise from both Government and industry sources over the past few years for research, says Prof Burton, who himself failed to attract funding for research from the Government's research initiative, Science Foundation Ireland.

The general downturn in the semiconductor industry also affected Europractice's general business last year. There was a clear reduction in the number of chip prototypes during 2002.

The organisation's annual report notes gloomily that after two tears of a downturn, the semiconductor industry is not yet giving any real signs of recovery.

Mr Bill Reilly, public affairs manager at Intel - the world's biggest semiconductor firm - agrees that Ireland will have to do more to encourage research and development at the university level.

But he says several Science Foundation Ireland initiatives are providing very good stimulus in the IC design sector already.

"We are already sponsoring research into plasma physics at Dublin City University and we hope to be involved in further research with the Science Foundation in nanotechnology."

He also questions whether the Europractice league tables accurately reflect the scale of the Republic's IC design research .

"Europractice is certainly not something that we would focus on because it is mainly for small and medium-sized businesses," he says.

"When we develop intellectual property for a whole variety of reasons we like to patent it in the US."

This means that Intel's Shannon-based integrated circuit research centre, which develops cutting-edge chips for communication equipment, would not use the Europractice resource.

Mr Lee Barry, director of engineering at ParthusCeva, agrees Europractice is not suitable for much of Irish industry because of it doesn't concentrate on some of the more advanced chipsets.

Rather, Europractice is ideal for smaller-run prototypes that can be made at low cost, he says.

This view is shared by Mr David Hanna, head of IDA Ireland's information and communications technology (ICT) division, which is responsible of attracting cutting-edge integrated circuit design companies.

"Integrated circuit design is very important to the IDA and we push this sector very hard," he says. "There are 1,300 people currently working in IC design at multinationals based here, which is proportionately more than most other European states."

Many of the big multinationals such as Xilinx and Intel would not need to use the Europractice design service, says Mr Hanna.

But the low level of university research poses a competitiveness threat to Irish design.

This is the big challenge that Science Foundation Ireland, which has a budget of €650 million, will have to address. But Dr Alistair Glass, director of ICT at Science Foundation Ireland, is undaunted and has been relatively impressed at the strong IC design sector in the Republic, since he arrived here a year ago.

Science Foundation is already supporting three research initiatives at Irish universities in the field and all of these projects have passed international peer review for funding, he says.

Certainly boosting links between the multinational sector and universities could hold the key to improving the Republic's poor Europractice average score.