Good morning. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you today.
If you have any questions, I will be pleased to answer any questions in Quebecois as well.
I'm Gord Harling, president of CMC. CMC was founded in 1984 as a not-for-profit by the Canadian government. At the time, it was actually to provide access to Nortel's manufacturing capability so researchers across Canada could develop their own microchips, test them, and publish papers internationally. Over time, it has evolved, and we now have three different programs—what I like to call CAD, fab and lab.
CAD is computer-aided design software, and today we serve 52 different computer-aided design packages to researchers across Canada, from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. We simplify the access to those tools, and by bulk buying and sharing licences, we're able to deploy a vast network of software across Canada. This makes it much easier for researchers and takes away some of the barriers to innovation, because it's simpler for them to train students and carry out their research.
I'll take one example. We have a tool that would cost on the open market, commercially, $10 million a year. We have 800 copies of that licence, and on any given day about 500 researchers are using that licence. It's an $8-billion value if you do the math. Obviously, universities could never pay that, but through special arrangements with these suppliers we're able to provide that.
Once you design something, you want to fabricate it, so we have an international network of fabrication facilities. We use 20 different processes at nine different factories around the world, and this is what we build. This wafer is covered in chips. There are several billion transistors on this, and when we get the chips back, we cut them up and hand them out to the researchers. By putting multiple researchers onto the same wafer, again, we reduce costs by bulk buying and doing things they cannot do alone. We might buy $100,000 worth of “siliconaria” and share it among 10 or 20 designers, simplifying access for them and allowing them to do international-level research.
Our final area of research is the lab, where we actually develop platform technologies that researchers can use to build on. So, we'll build an amplifier that has an open face so they can put any material they like on it. They can sense bacteria, odours, the humidity, temperature, light or whatever you like. They don't need to create this. It doesn't exist in the open market, but they can modify it and use it for their own needs.
So, those are our three programs—CAD, fab, and lab. Today, we have 67 member universities. We have 730 paying members, who pay an annual subscription to access our services. They sign up their own researchers in their departments, so we have about 3,600 researchers and about 4,800 students who use these tools every day. Every year, 780 graduates come out having used the CMC tools and technologies. It's critical to their theses, their research and their ongoing publications.
We trace back the roots of 950 companies working in Canada today, companies like BlackBerry and OpenText. These are folks who were originally researchers using our services at university. Every year there are, on average, about 15 start-up companies that come out. This service is a great job creator. It's foundational to all supercluster areas. It's foundational to all strategic tables. Electronics are in every product you can possibly imagine. There are over 200 devices in your cellphone right now. Unless you have a really old lawnmower, you probably don't have an appliance that doesn't have electronics in it. So we think it's extremely important.
We make four recommendations in our paper. The first is that the government continue to invest in microelectronic, photonics and quantum technologies—all things that we enable and facilitate. The second is that they continue to fund the major research facilities and the MSI, which we call Canada's national design network.
One of the problems with these national research facilities is that we have a forty-sixty rule for funding. We have to find 60¢ of every dollar to get the 40¢ cents from the MSI funds. That is extremely difficult when you're a national organization like ours. We can't go to each province and expect all of them to pay up. There are have and have-not provinces, so we don't want to be unfair about it. It really is a federal mandate to support this research.