CMC gears up to provide commercialization services to research community and industry

Four years after its conception, a new commercialization engine is being launched by CMC Microsystems aimed at creating start-ups and providing services for companies seeking competitive advantage through the increased application and use of microsystems. Funded with internal resources, DMT Microsystems is a classic bootstrapping initiative that will see the wholly-owned subsidiary take on clients that can benefit from CMC's deep university-industry expertise and state-of-the-art equipment to boost their productivity and competitiveness.

At the heart of DMT's raison d'etre is the need to maintain and enhance manufacturing expertise in Canada in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition from developed and developing nations. Studies have demonstrated that the flight of manufacturing offshore leads to the loss of skilled jobs and accompanying intellectual property. As Canada's leading facilitator of chip design and micro- and nano-systems integration, CMC is well positioned to push Canadian manufacturing up the value-added scale, thereby maintaining and attracting highly qualified personnel and IP.

"Say that I want to go to Industry Canada or IRAP (Industrial Research Assistance Program) and show them that part of what CMC is doing should be focused on these types of base enabling technologies. We know they're going to be in there (new products and processes) and we have to be good at them," says Dr Ian McWalter, CMC's president and CEO. "Focus on that and CMC can really help you do that … I'm looking to leverage it 10 times, 100 times the kinds of resources CMC can put into this. What I'm trying to do now is spearhead it, saying here are some really good examples of what you can do here."

CMC's primary funding sources are the Natural Resources and Engineering Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario government, which limit their support to research and accompanying infrastructure. But over the years, CMC has generated and retained additional cash — about $4 million — which it plans to use to finance DMT's activities.

"We're not looking to pick winners. What we're saying is, we have a winning set of technologies. You don't have to go fishing — microelectronics, microfluidics, photonics, nano — to know that these are going to win and that you need to have very good people who know how to use them and integrate them," says McWalter. "It's CMC's mission, which is the research excellence part of it, with all the good things we believe accrue from that. How can we use those resources to accelerate some of these commercialization efforts?"

DMT fits well with other investments Canada has made in the microelectronics space in recent years. Universities across the country have recently secured funding for specialized fabrication and design equipment that forms the basis of CMC's Embedded Systems Canada initiative and its national Design Network. Add to that provincial support and a $200 million plus investment in the MiQro Innovation Collaborative Centre (C2MI) — an international centre of excellence for electronic assembly research affiliated with the Univ of Sherbrooke — and the total invested in microelectronics and nano expertise tops $500 million.

CMC is positioned to take leading-edge technologies and provide funding for scale-up and the development of design tools and design systems. Such value-add makes its role more attractive to companies seeking to utilize C2MI or start-ups seeking to establish a niche in the global microelectronics value chain.

"Some of the things we can do using a university micro lab or the kinds of access we have is to go half way to scale-up … If you take that next step and you design it in a way that is scalable and you have that built into design tools and design systems, that's where CMC can help," says McWalter. "We don't have all the answers and not everything will turn out. But I do know that if we don't invest significant resources in moving this forward, we'll miss the boat … CMC can seed and leverage an awful lot of things. That's the basic vision of it."

CMC has received board approval to develop DMT and secure initial clients. McWalter has been casting throughout the research and business communities to promote its services and find suitable projects that validate and demonstrate the value of DMT's services. He points to McMaster Univ's new Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy as the kind of facilities industry could utilize.

"Their lab is the best in the world and they are claiming results that no one else can achieve. They can do noise reduction techniques and look at things at the sub-angstrom (one ten billionth) level," he says. "This is part of what CMC can do as well. We've got some great facilities ... We're moving closer to the leading edge in terms of what we can provide for people. If you're a company that wants to piggyback, it's there."

One roadblock to realizing the benefits stemming from embedded expertise and facilities lies in a relative lack of coordination, alignment and outreach: tasks that would benefit from a strategic policy approach that government — particularly Industry Canada — is best positioned to provide. "They're receptive to ideas that they — the government and the bureaucracy combined — need to find a role that they genuinely believe will be useful … I think the Jenkins report will stir things up a bit," says McWalter. "There are those who say … let the private sector take care of it. We'd be the only country in the world who did that. The fact of the matter is, whatever your ideology, most countries give a lot of money directly to companies."

While Industry Canada decides on the best approach for stimulating value-added areas for industry, CMC will pursue its area of expertise through DMT, facilitating access to know-how, equipment and supply chains by selling services or even seeding promising technologies to add value.

"We're in nine provinces and we're saying we'll take the management burden. If there's a little gap, we'll fund the costs and try to take the risk away," he says. "We have to encourage manufacturing — typically high value-added manufacturing in health care, microelectronics, energy and automotive, and we have to reduce risk and get into new technologies so that many more Canadian companies will do it."

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