Newly announced FABrIC program to accelerate high tech manufacturing in Canada
by CM Staff
Program funds will complement the R&D programs at over 100 small, medium and large Canadian companies and accelerate their commercialization of products.
MONTREAL — CMC Microsystems (CMC) has brought together 14 project founders from industry, academia and non-profit technology research organizations to support a five year, $700 M program to accelerate high tech manufacturing in Canada.
Called FABrIC, Fabrication of Integrated Components for the Internet’s Edge, the program expects to attract $480 M in industrial R&D. The proposal also details $100M generated as revenues or provided by provinces or matching funding and used during the project. This proposal has been submitted to the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund, (SIF) administered by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) for a $120 M investment.
Program funds will complement the R&D programs at over 100 small, medium and large Canadian companies and accelerate their commercialization of products. Some 4,000 new high-tech jobs will purportedly result from the program.
According to CMC Microsystems, Canada has become a global hub for quantum innovation, and it is crucial to grow the Canadian quantum ecosystem. FABrIC will be supporting prototyping and manufacturing for Canadian quantum firms including Xanadu, 1Qbit, SB Quantum, Photonic, and D-Wave, and others.
Under the program, CMC will build and assemble quantum devices in Canada with the help of partners and quantum institutes at Université de Sherbrooke, University of British Columbia, and University of Waterloo. This will hopefully provide manufacturing capacity to start-ups and scale-ups which would otherwise be out of reach.
Applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) require intensive computing operations. Combined with massive amounts of data they produce, these applications test the limits of classical computers. Quantum computers, however, can solve problems with a complexity that exceeds the computing capacity of conventional supercomputers, opening new possibilities for applications across different fields including AI and ML, biochemistry, finance, and cybersecurity.
