DAVID LAMMERS, Contributing Writer
Toronto, Canada – When the United States committed ~$50 billion to subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing, voices in Canada reasoned that Canada – with a population of ~40 million, about one-ninth that of the U.S.A – should jump in with about $5B of subsidies of its own.
Then cooler heads prevailed. Canada lacks a leading-edge CMOS fab, and $5B would not go far to build one. And fabs must be regularly updated, requiring billions more, not to mention the infrastructure and engineering talent needed to support such a monolith.
Instead, the normally frugal Canadians opted for a much more realistic proposal (which remains subject to final approval by the government) of $223 million over five years. The project, FABrIC, for Fabrication of Integrated Components for the Internet’s Edge, is expected to bolster manufacturing and services in five areas where Canada has existing strengths: compound semiconductors; photonics; MEMS; Internet of Things; and quantum devices. Parallel to these is new funding to support advanced packaging at IBM’s large packaging operation in Bromont, Quebec.
Canada excels at forming collaborative public-private support organizations, such as incubators for startups, a national lab for photonics manufacturing, among others. As the recent Nobel Prize for physics demonstrated, Canadian universities have led the world in artificial intelligence – with Geoffrey Hinton, now a professor at the University of Toronto, as the leading light.
A lack of urgency
However, regarding microelectronics manufacturing, Canada has lagged in creating a national sense of urgency of the kind seen in several Asian nations. “There is not a sense of crisis in Canada,” said Doug Suerich, director of marketing at the Peer Group (Kitchener, Ontario), a major vendor of factory automation and tool connectivity software.
Because Canada has so much oil, gas and other natural resources, “there is not a sense of crisis here, not a feeling of missed opportunity. One could argue that Canada has kind of missed the boat in microelectronics,” said Suerich.
Also, Canadians largely believe they can rely on the United States for military protection in a time of crisis, despite an obvious need to keep ahead in the electronics-based arms race. Because Ontario is across the border from Michigan, much of Canada’s manufacturing base has gravitated to the auto industry, rather than microelectronics, he added.
This lack of urgency existed 15 years ago when the Canadian federal government largely stood idly by when Canada’s premier telecommunications company, Nortel — hit by an accounting scandal and management mistakes — went bankrupt in 2009, stranding 94,500 employees worldwide.
Uncle Sam take note
As the United States begins to fund collaborative research centers focused on semiconductors, she could take a page or two from Canada’s success in connecting a wide variety of resources. Three non-profit organizations which support technology firms are well established here: ventureLAB, CMC Microsystems, and C2MI.
CMC Microsystems, a not-for-profit founded in 1984, connects academics with ~1,000 companies across Canada, supporting fledgling companies with design tools, multi-project-wafer runs, and testing of microelectronics prototypes.
Gord Harling, CEO of CMC Microsystems, said Canada’s native population has been in decline, leading Canada to adopt some of the most liberal immigration policies in the world. The relative availability of skilled engineers, many of them Indians and Chinese, led Marvell for example to expand its Canadian design center from 260 to 850 people. AMD has 3,500 working in the Toronto area, many of them former ATI graphics chip designers who now work to develop AMD’s AI processors.
However, earlier this year Canadian voters, pressured by a shortage of housing that is worse than that in the United States, clamored for much more restrictive immigration rules. The new rules have limited the influx of students and post-doctoral engineers who have, by the tens of thousands, found employment at Canadian technology firms, Harling said.