Not the best written article out there, but there are some valid points. The part about design tools not being up to snuff is quite true. As is the reason: no

Not the best written article out there, but there are some valid points. The part about design tools not being up to snuff is quite true. As is the reason: not enough money is being invested in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) field right now. Most of the VC has been going to the web space for years now and that's sucked a lot of the capital away from very important things like chip development and chip design software. I would also suggest that the brain drain isn't actually H1B's moving back to their home countries: a huge amount of talent has been sucked into the web space. EDA software is one of the most challenging areas of software development - all kinds of interesting problems to solve in chip layout, power minimization, high level synthesis, etc. Yet hardly anyone graduating with a CS degree knows that it even exists - they graduate expecting to work for a social networking, web company. To be fair, it's not like EDA is a big enough field to absorb that many CS grads in any given year - in fact EDA is rather stagnant right now... but I think that goes back to the lack of capital going into EDA at this point. Given how important the semiconductor industry is to the US it does seem like a major misallocation of resources.