Brazilian Silicon Valley - History

History

Until the 1970s, the Campinas region had few industries and had an economy based on agriculture and in the services and commerce sectors. With the foundation of UNICAMP and the ready availability of high-quality researchers, engineers and students focused on physics, electrical engineering, computer sciences, mathematics, mechanical engineering, etc., a number of high-tech companies started to establish their industrial plants and R&D labs nearby, such as IBM. The municipality of Campinas and those surrounding it began to foster actively the growth of this new area, and the CIATEC I and II (Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Pólo de Alta Tecnologia de Campinas) industrial zones were established around the university campus, in the subdistrict of Barão Geraldo. The Center for Research and Development (CPqD) set up by Telebras, a state holding for the telecommunications industry in Brazil, which had grown enormously under the military regime umbrella, was the second boost to Campinas Silicon Valley. A law was passed by the Federal government, protecting Brazilian-made technology against imports, and this resulted in further growth. Together with UNICAMP researchers a number of pioneering developments occurred in the brand-new areas of lasers, fiber optics, digital telephony, computer technology, software development, and so on. In addition, the Petrobras state-owned oil giant was starting to develop a long range oil exploration program with the aim of making Brazil independent of oil imports, a policy also started by the military for strategic and economic reasons (the oil shock had deeply affected the country), and UNICAMP was one of the leading research universities to participate. In this respect, UNICAMP's open philosophy of collaboration with the private sector (unheard of in Brazil until that time), established by his visionary founder and first rector, Dr. Zeferino Vaz, prepared the way for a unique synergy between industry and university.