Deep within IBM's Almaden Research Center, a stunning hillside campus tucked away in a nature preserve south of Silicon Valley, Dr. Donald M. Eigler presides over a three-room nook that bristles with tools to pick up, move and corral individual atoms.
Like Eigler, 48, a physicist who wears his hair in a ponytail -- and pads around Almaden with his dog named Argon, after the chemical element -- the equipment in the lab is both sophisticated and approachable. The million-dollar atom movers operate in vacuums at temperatures so low that the atoms are nearly rigid. The machines produce sharp pictures of individual atoms, yet the controls in an adjacent room are an everyday keyboard and mouse.
That allows Eigler to tell visitors, "You can't leave without moving an atom." Position the cursor over what appears on the computer screen to be a small, side-lit mound on a flat plane -- it's actually a cobalt atom on top of a fingernail-size wafer of crystallized copper. Click and drag, then let go of the mouse. That's all there is to it.
The International Business Machines Corp grabs every chance it gets to provide customers, business partners and journalists a moment to horse around in these nanoscale dimensions. It sends an unmistakable message about IBM's research capabilities.
Even so, work like Eigler's, which probes the secrets of the universe but has not -- so far at least -- resulted in products for IBM is not what research experts find most fascinating about the 3,200-person global empire of IBM Research. Instead, they are struck by the way IBM's laboratories stand out for a more practical reason: among the estimated 35,000 corporate research labs in the US, IBM's are the gold standard for turning research into corporate profits.
Patents
Last year alone, IBM was awarded 2,922 patents in the US -- an average of more than 11 each working day, and 43 percent ahead of NEC of Japan, in second place. It was the eighth consecutive year in which IBM received the largest share of patents in the US (The national total last year was 176,087).
Of course, not all of these patents ranked with revolutionary IBM inventions of the past -- like the hard-disk drive and the scanning tunneling microscope, the first microscope capable of forming images of individual atoms. But they cumulatively fattened a huge portfolio of patents that generated US$1.7 billion in licensing fees alone in 2000, not to mention what the underlying innovations did for IBM's own product lines.
"If you had to benchmark your laboratory against only one other these days, it would be IBM," said John Seely Brown until a year ago the director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the widely admired laboratory that invented the laser printer, Ethernet networks and the point-and-click method of using computers.
Paul M. Horn, the senior vice president who runs all of IBM Research from its flagship laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, figures that he has his charges in the right frame of mind to preserve that reputation. "Even the guys doing exploratory stuff know it's all about the success of the parent," he said.
A decade ago, IBM seemed an unlikely role model. In the early 1990s, IBM Research was buffeted by layoffs and other belt-tightening measures, including the end of most research on new classes of ceramic superconductors, a field of physics in which researchers at the IBM lab in Zurich won a Nobel prize in 1987.
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