Actually most semiconductor technology was developed by industry. Nowadays it is often too expensive for a university to do any cutting edge IC research without industry partnerships.
Yeah, I'm beginning to worry about some CS disciplines, especially Software Engineering. SoftEng appears to be playing catch-up to industry in a number of sub-disciplines, due to the pace of knowledge sharing across the net exponentially increasing. It feels like unit testing might be the last huge thing academic SoftEng contributes.
There's going to have to be a little bit of realignment, I think, and some disciplines are going to have to start letting go of being "we're the practical ones and you could deploy our tech tomorrow" to pushing out a little bit, maybe incorporating things like AI and stuff.
Yes. Academic research need not be done only at universities. Even industrial labs award PhD degrees and do solid research which is one of the things a PhD trains you for.
