Spectrum Engineers Yearn for High-Tech Ambience of Silicon Valley : Technology: They still feel as if they are living in the hinterland and long for Irvine to develop a creative climate like the north’s.

For many of the high-tech engineers and entrepreneurs in the Irvine Spectrum business park, the technology culture of Silicon Valley is an inspiration.

Silicon Valley bred a high-tech culture and spirit of innovation that spawned the microchips and computers that have changed the way we live and work. Engineers such as the late Robert Noyce, founder of semiconductor giant Intel Corp., and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of Apple Computer Inc., were the holy order of that culture.

Some might argue that even Silicon Valley has grown stuffier with age as companies such as Apple grew larger and became more “corporate.” But some county engineers still look up to their northern counterparts. They say they feel as if they are living in the hinterlands and long for the day when the Spectrum develops its own high-tech culture.

Gilbert Amelio, chief executive of National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, has spent much of his career working in Orange County and Silicon Valley.

“For up-and-coming engineers, being embedded in an engineering infrastructure in Silicon Valley helps get the creative juices flowing,” said Amelio, former president of Rockwell Communications Systems in Newport Beach. “When I worked in Orange County, there was a certain amount of admiration for the success of Silicon Valley, and there might have been a touch of competitiveness.”

To hear Orange County engineers talk, it would seem that the rivalry between Northern California and Southern California extends not only to the state’s water supply but also to another precious resource: engineering talent.

Tom Craft, a senior engineer at computer maker AST Research Inc., laments that the Spectrum is missing the artifacts of technology culture--the technical bookstores, popular watering holes for after-hours techie talk and the community recognition that makes engineers feel like captains of innovation rather than computer nerds.

“You don’t get as much respect if you’re in engineering here,” he said. “We’ve actually tried to do recruiting up there, and it’s a problem getting people to move. And professionally, there are fewer electronics firms here, so you find your mobility can be constrained.”

In Silicon Valley, employers earned a reputation for innovative personnel practices. They provided exercise rooms, organized beer busts on Friday afternoons, relaxed dress codes and encouraged employee brainstorming to foster creativity. Many of these ideas were adopted by employers across the country.

Charles Divine, a Stanford University graduate and a research director at Toshiba’s telecommunications division in Irvine, noted that Silicon Valley’s unique technology culture arose from the countercultural currents of the 1960s and early 1970s.

That culture is also pervasive outside the office. Where else but in Silicon Valley could you walk into a supermarket and buy computer disks and vegetables in the same place? Some Orange County engineers say they long for a similar atmosphere.

If the northern engineers are unhappy, they can find jobs down the street at a rival firm. This job mobility makes these engineers feel invincible.

More important, engineers in Silicon Valley have the benefit of “creative irrigation,” or the ability to tap into a network of colleagues to thrash out new ideas, said James Forrester, a vice president at Silicon Valley Bank’s office in Newport Beach, who spent several years making loans to high-tech firms in Santa Clara.

In contrast with the zany atmosphere of Silicon Valley, the Spectrum seems rather staid. The park was built, after all, during the conservative decade of the 1980s, following the Irvine Co.’s idea of a sanitized, master-planned community.

“Whether true or not, Irvine is viewed as a place where conformity is the rule,” said Michael Beyard, a researcher at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “It is a very different subculture from Silicon Valley.”

The Irvine Co. plan also explains why there are no well-known watering holes for Spectrum engineers and others to gather for chats about the performance of the latest Intel microchip. The developer had planned to build a shopping mall, bars and restaurants in the Spectrum, but the project was postponed for lack of interest from retailers.

As the Irvine Co. planned the Spectrum, some companies had misgivings about re-creating the Silicon Valley-style mobility that engineers love. The Irvine Co. abandoned a plan to build a biotechnology wing in the park after companies complained that it would make it too tempting for employees to jump to a competitor across the street.

Some people do not care whether a new Silicon Valley culture emerges in Orange County.

Ten years ago, John Peterson, engineering vice president at Western Digital, said it was impossible to get anyone to move from Silicon Valley to Orange County, which was associated with smog, freeways and surfing.

There is some mobility between companies in Silicon Valley and the county now, Peterson said, and graduates from UC Irvine and engineers from local defense companies constantly replenish the pool of home-grown engineers.

Industry isolation has its advantages. Peterson noted with pride that nobody leaked the details of a major engineering venture between IBM and Western Digital to develop a notebook-size computer now on the market.

Others suggest that the strength of the technology culture in Silicon Valley no longer gives it a competitive edge. National Semiconductor’s Amelio says Orange County is similar to Silicon Valley in the most important respect: Both share the entrepreneurial spirit that leads to the creation of spinoff companies.

“Drive and intelligence are the basics of creativity,” said Don Turner, who worked in Silicon Valley for several years and now manages a group of engineers at Western Digital. “There’s some advantage up there because of the mass of industry. But the creative process is the same here.

“My favorite thing to do to be creative is to take a walk at lunch. I can do that down here as well as I could up there,” he said.

By extension, the paucity of technology culture in the Irvine Spectrum should not give its engineers an inferiority complex, said Allen Scott, a geography professor and director of UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

“Orange County doesn’t have the social identity that Silicon Valley has, and I don’t think it will ever catch up in computers and semiconductors,” he said. “But it’s a misconception that Silicon Valley is light-years ahead in technology. Orange County has a broader mix of technology, and that makes it more dynamic.”

Safi U. Qureshey, chief executive of AST Research, said the world of facsimile machines, trade shows and retreats keeps a strong current of ideas flowing in Orange County. The expansion of the so-called global village has lessened any competitive edge that Silicon Valley’s companies may once have enjoyed, Qureshey says.

“For a start-up company, the support of venture capital in the north may bring some value, and when you’re small you look for credibility any way you can,” he said.

“But I don’t think we’re looked down upon because we’re not in Silicon Valley anymore.”