Commodity chip prices, particularly memory chips, will continue to fall at a modest annual rate of 30% before they stabilize in the middle of next year.

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Some commodity chip makers will reestablish profitability before that time (and companies with highly differentiated products are profitable today) but once prices stabilize in the middle of 2013 all players should see their earnings move into positive territory until the next cyclical downturn begins in 2015.

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The broader benefit of all that science: "Having the technical product helps Air Products also sell the commodity gases" to those same customers, says Alain Harrus, former tech chief at chip-equipment maker Novellus.

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That market was also destined to end up on the commodity pile, so Endoh in 1994 assigned 50 researchers to a challenging task: Cut plastic chip package costs by one-third.

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