ALBANY, New York -- Four of the world's largest computer chip makers and New York state will spend $600 million over the next five years on a research, education and economic development project focused on creating the next generation of computer microchips while limiting costs.

The project, to be officially launched today, will get $200 million in funding and equipment from Armonk-based IBM Corp., Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Infineon Technologies AG of Germany and Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology Inc. The state is contributing $180 million. More than $200 million is coming from numerous companies that provide the materials and equipment used to make semiconductors.

Analysts say such collaboration is needed in the industry with research and development costs skyrocketing in recent years because of advancements in the speed and intricacy of semiconductors.

"Chip companies have continued to make things smaller and faster and it gets increasingly more difficult to do this," said Bob Johnson, an industry analyst with the Gartner market research firm. "They have recognized they need to pool R&D money to forward basic research."

The work will take place at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany. Organizers expect more than 500 researchers, engineers and other workers to eventually be involved in different aspects of the project, dubbed INVENT.

More than 300 of those positions will be on the SUNY campus, said Alain Kaloyeros, the president of Albany Nanotech, a SUNY affiliated center for nanotechnology research and development funded by the state and private sector.

Nanotechnology is the science of working at the atomic and molecular levels -- at scales, for example, that are about 1/100,000th the diameter of a human hair. INVENT Research will focus on lithography, the use of light to map the circuitry of computer chips, Kaloyeros said.

Kaloyeros said that while private companies have funded university research in places like Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas, the INVENT project is the first to combine public and private investment on such a research and development initiative.

"This was one of the key anchor tenants we wanted to put in place to make whole our lithography capabilities," Kaloyeros said. "No other location in the U.S. even comes close."

The state, in an effort to transform an area dependent on government bureaucracy and rust-belt industry into another Silicon Valley, has invested more than $500 million already in the Albany Nanotech campus.

Sematech, a consortium of nine of the world's largest computer chip makers, is building a $400 million research center here, and Tokyo Electron Ltd., the world's second-largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, built a $300 million facility next door.

Absent from the table, however, is Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker. Intel's current market share of the highly competitive x86 microprocessor market is about 80 percent of worldwide sales by unit volume and 90 percent by revenue.

In a lawsuit filed in June in U.S. District Court in Delaware, AMD alleged Intel bullied large-scale computer-makers, wholesale distributors and retailers, to secure a monopoly in the microprocessors that run the Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux operating systems.

Still, Kaloyeros said he expects Intel eventually will join the consortium. He noted that the members of Sematech, formed in 1988, have worked together in the past to jump technological hurdles, but have then gone on to compete against one another.