As a summary of the state of the technology sector these days, Intel chief executive Dr Craig Barrett's assessment - "Today, business is crappy everywhere" - is about as pithy and precise as you can get.

Dr Barrett is adept at the slightly pained but resigned look that indicates he's heard journalists' questions on economic downturns, tech sector doldrums and profit warnings a hundred times before, but he'll answer them.

Indeed, unlike many leaders of big companies facing a downswing, he doesn't try to duck them by rerouting the conversation immediately into some jargon-filled sideroad that extols the company. Instead, he's fairly direct.

"Today, where isn't there negativity in the market?" he asks. "The US is in a state of trouble and decline. Some might even classify it as a recession."

Those are the realities. They aren't pleasant and Intel is hurting because of them. Sales, which rang in at $8.3 billion (#9.7 billion) in the second quarter a year ago, are expected to decline to between $6.2 billion and $6.8 billion this quarter, with Intel warning that the company would drag in at the bottom end of expectations.

The company's prediction of recovery in the second half of the year gave the markets a short boost. But as other chipmakers - including Philips this week - have said they won't see recovery until next year, analysts have dithered back and forth on how to assess the market leader's fortunes.

"Opinions are cheap," quips Dr Barrett.

The short-term views of Wall Street don't overly concern him, he says. While that's unlikely to be entirely true, Intel is one of the few technology companies around long enough in an enormously youthful sector to have a sense of history and to have actually experienced those much-discussed "economic cycles".

"What we do is take the collective intelligence of the company, gathered over years of these cycles," he says. "And what we know is, technology always continues to move forward. It doesn't pay any attention to the economy."

Thus, he says, the company continues to make investments in compatible companies (it has a fat investment chest of $7.5 billion), do research and plan product releases, to be ready when the economy is on the upswing.

"We invest heavily in R&D for new products, invest heavily in the brand and then just keep moving forward. We don't pay particular attention to the gloom and doom. We have a vision and the vision revolves around the Internet."

Dr Barrett is on a European tour to propound that vision, summarised under the somewhat lofty term "the four architectures". Even Dr Barrett - a former associate professor in materials science and engineering at Stanford University in California - admits that it sounds more like a book or a university course than, well, "a strategy for the Internet age", as Intel grandly puts it.

Basically, four different chip architectures ("silicon building blocks") suit four different aspects of the Internet world - PCs and low-end servers, databases and high-end servers, small Net access devices, and networks.

Intel is particularly interested in expanding into some areas it has skirted before, such as information storage and handling (its high-end servers have processors that could in theory store 18 exabytes of information - Intel says that's enough space to hold every word ever spoken throughout history, three times over).

Wireless devices also engage the company, as do the possibilities of business-to-business (B2B) Internet markets.

Dr Barrett is very enthusiastic about B2B, which he says still remains overlooked after the hype and the tumble of business-to-consumer (B2C) Internet companies.

"When B2C crashed, there was this idea that the whole Internet had crashed. The Internet is alive and well," he says. "The bloom is not off B2B. B2B is what will drive commerce on the Internet."

And of course, there's always advances in chip design and production, which still eerily follows the now famous Moore's Law, named after one of the company's co-founders. In 1965, Intel's Dr Gordon Moore observed that chips double in capacity about every 18 months. Recently, scientists had feared that Moore's Law would hit the wall of technical limitation - some phenomenal breakthroughs would be needed to overcome restrictions placed on chip development by their minute size and huge capacity. But Intel has announced a new chip that operates on the atomic level - parts of it are only three atoms thick. That development means Moore's Law should remain in operation another 15 years or so, says Dr Barrett.

In the meantime, Intel is sticking to its predictions of an upturn in sales in the rest of the year, although Dr Barrett warns that the company is in a quiet period and cannot address short-term issues.

The third and fourth quarters are traditionally stronger for the company, as demand for computers begins to build after summer holidays. He also believes Microsoft's introduction of Windows XP, its Windows upgrade, in September will also stimulate sales.

Dr Barrett also says Intel remains committed to building its stalled third microprocessor fabrication plant in Leixlip, Fab 24, and intends to resume construction on the £2.2 billion (#2.8 billion) facility "sometime in early 2002".

"It's a question of when; it's not a question of if" Fab 24 would be completed, he says. "It's on our technology roadmap. It depends on what the economy does and when we'll need it. When you're in a trough, it's hard to predict these things."

Construction on the plant was frozen in its preliminary stages in March when Intel said it needed to conserve cash. The company laid off the majority of the 1,400 builders already involved, retaining a skeleton crew of under 100. Intel expects the plant to be operational in 2003 and employ an additional 1,000.

Chip facilities are too costly to build for Intel to abandon them, says Dr Barrett. "We make a big investment in wafer (silicon chip) plants. You don't walk away from that kind of capital investment or human investment."

Upgrading existing facilities was also cheaper than greenfield investments elsewhere, he adds.

Intel was also not concerned about the Republic's rejection of the Nice Treaty, Dr Barrett says, noting, "These things will sort themselves out." He says he believes the European Union's future is already fairly set and the economic community would move ahead despite the vote.

Dr Barrett confirms that Irish technology companies remain part of Intel's investment strategy, with the State viewed as a "hotbed", along with Israel and India, which Intel refers to as the "three Is". Particular strengths here include wireless and networking companies, but a range of hardware and software companies are intriguing, he says. After years of exporting its technology graduates, the Republic now has "the opportunity for bright folks with clever business plans to go out and create great technology," he says.