Trillium Photonics spins out of NRC

The National Research Council (NRC) has licensed a key component of its photonics technology into the marketplace with the creation of Trillium Photonics Inc, which attracted more than $10 million in venture capital from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Menlo Park CA.

Trillium will be housed at the NRC's Ottawa incubator facility with a staff of 16 focused on the engineering of second-generation fibre optic amplifiers required by the telecommunications industry as it continues to gravitate towards optically switched communications traffic.

The intellectual property (IP) was licensed by Drs Simon Boothroyd and Piotr Myslinski, former NRC researchers with the photonics systems group of the Institute for National Measurement Standards (INMS). With the new financing, efforts will be directed towards staffing and equipping a development and manufacturing operation allowing Trillium to produce large quantities of the products they design. A rapid expansion is anticipated, as the firm adds positions in engineering, manufacturing and marketing.

The Trillium founders credit the success of their new venture to the strength of the NRC's research in fibre optics telecommunications, as well as the freedom it affords researchers to pursue leading edge technologies. That represents a dramatic cultural change from just a few years ago when entrepreneurially-minded researchers were frustrated by the challenges of taking NRC IP into the market.

Trillium is positioning itself in one of the most vibrant areas of the telecommunications sector, which is witnessing the transformation from largely electronically switched core network backbones to optically switched cores. The shift has been driven by emerging Internet-based applications requiring faster speeds and greater bandwidth - attributes that fibre optics is ideally positioned to deliver.

The Trillium financing is the first of several that Mohr Davidow Ventures plans for the Ottawa area. The company recently announced its intention to invest $150 million in Ottawa-based start-ups over the next two years, highlighting the rich telecommunication R&D environment now based in the region. The other major venture capital player in the area is Capital Alliance Ventures Inc.

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