SEMATECH (SEmiconductor MAnufacturing TECHnology) is a non-profit consortium that performs basic research into semiconductor manufacturing. It was conceived of in 1986, formed in 1987, and began operating in 1988 as a partnership between the United States government and 14 U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers to solve common manufacturing problems and regain competitiveness for the U.S. semiconductor industry that had been surpassed by Japanese industry in the mid-1980s. SEMATECH was funded over 5 years by public subsidies coming from the US DoD via DARPA for a total of $500 million.
Following a determination by SEMATECH's Board of Directors to eliminate matching funds from the U.S. government after 1996, the organization's focus shifted from the U.S. semiconductor industry to the larger international semiconductor industry, abandoning the initial U.S. government-initiative.[citation needed] During the mid 90's the organization's name was changed to International Sematech to reflect its international composition and in September of 2004, changed back to SEMATECH. Nearly half of the 15 current member companies in the SEMATECH consortia are non-US corporations.
SEMATECH currently has three subsidiaries, the Advanced Technology Development Facility (ATDF) established in 2004, the Advanced Materials Research Center (AMRC), and the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI).
Wikipedia -- Sematech

"Much of what I did back then was look for estimates of the cost of alternative energy sources ...   And the estimates ... were optimistic. ...  None of it happened. ...  You might say that this is my answer to those who cheerfully assert that human ingenuity and technological progress will solve all our problems. For the last 35 years, progress on energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations."

First and foremost, the fact that forecasters, whether they be economists or science fiction writers, are wrong on their forecasts does not say anything about the world they are trying to model — it merely says that the forecasters were wrong.  The fact that the the Canadian will be wrong in its prediction that 4.5 billion people will die by 2012 due to global warming does not mean that the physical world will somehow have changed, it means that the people at the Canadian are idiots. 
[...]
But his key statement is that progress on alternative energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations?  Whose expectations?  Certainly not mine, or those of the knowledgeable energy industry insiders, who have been consistently pessimistic about most of these alternatives over the last decade or two.   Perhaps they have fallen below Krugman’s or Greenpeace’s expectations, but so what?
[...]
One of the reasons that these technologies have not advanced much is due to the absolutely staggering advances in oil exploration and production technology.  The last 35 years has seen a revolution, from computer reservoir modeling to horizontal drilling to ultra deep sea oil production to CO2 floods, it is in many ways a totally new industry.
Here is the way to decode what Mr. Krugman is saying:  It is not that the energy industry is not making huge technology gains, but that it is making gains in areas that Mr. Krugman did not expect, and, even more likely, it is not making its gains in the areas that Mr. Krugman wanted them to be.