Performance

Startup Companies

Startup Companies Enabled by CMC, 2007


CertiChip Inc., Waterloo, ON

CertiChip Inc. is a fabless semiconductor intellectual property (IP) company specializing in circuit techniques and architectures to improve the robustness of integrated circuits manufactured in advanced complementary metal oxide seminconductor (CMOS) processes at or below 90 nanometers. CertiChip has developed and patented several circuit designs which significantly improve the soft-error robustness in CMOS circuits. This IP can help companies design application specific integrated circuits in highly scaled CMOS technologies while ensuring that soft-error robustness is not compromised.

Dr. Manoj Sachdev, Professor at the University of Waterloo, and President and Chief Technical Officer of CertiChip, accessed CMC-supported products and services in order to prove the circuit techniques and architectures relating to his university research before they were commercialized by his company, CertiChip.  Related tools and technologies of particular significance to his research included the Cadence design suite of tools and the STMicroelectronics 90-nanometre microelectronics fabrication technology, brokered by CMC through its partner in France, Circuits Multi-Projets. The initial microelectronics research could not have been performed without CMC, credits Dr. Sachdev, as it would have been costly and would have diverted enormous amounts of time away from teaching and researching. Instead, time would have been spent to train students to use these technologies and to engaging industry when sourcing technologies.

GPL Circuits, Montréal, QC

GPL Circuits offers a one-of-a-kind Web-based service that provides access to intellectual property created during the testing and simulation of analog and digital integrated circuits. The company’s services can be used to develop a wide range of commercial microelectronic products, including wireless, audio, and automotive systems and applications.

Dr. Christian Fayomi, primary circuit designer at GPL, and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), has been using CMC-supported design tools and fabrication  processes to further his research efforts since 2003.  He has been able to successfully channel his experiences and expertise into a service-based startup company.

He will continue using CMC-provided fabrication services both to train post-graduate students and in his university-based research, specifically to prove the next generation of circuits.

MEMwave Inc., Ottawa, ON

MEMwave Inc. is focusing on advanced devices for next-generation wireless systems. The founders, Vijay Narasimhan and Colan Ryan, recognized a market need for high-speed mobile data operating at different frequencies for a number of communication technologies. The company has been working on a frequency agile antenna for mobile applications, which can operate both over the currently used spectrum and over projected WiMax frequencies. They have successfully filed a PCT application for an international patent.

CMC played an instrumental role in supporting the research activities of the founders while they were undergraduate student researchers at Carleton University. Dr. Niall Tait, academic supervisor of the students, describes the benefit of CMC to the eventual incorporation of the company as threefold: access to design and testing tools provided by CMC were essential to the related research efforts; CMC provided an opportunity for the students to present their research to peers at the 2007 Canadian Workshop on MEMS; and most significantly, according to Dr. Tait, the microsystems research environment and community of researchers that CMC has  helped to foster, allowed students see the potential of their technology and research.

SiliconPro, Ottawa, ON

SiliconPro is an Ottawa-based consulting company that focuses on providing a wide range of integrated circuit design services and infrastructure components to its customers. SiliconPro provides application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) expertise such as low power design techniques and design for debug (DFD) strategies.  In addition, the company offers ASIC infrastructure components at the register transfer level that can substantially reduce the cost and accelerate the development process of complex ASICs.

Dr. Ralph Mason, Founder of SiliconPro and Professor at Carleton University, has been relying on CMC Microsystems for over 20 years and has used CMC-supported design tools, test chips, and prototyping platforms to validate his research concepts. By providing access to these capabilities, CMC has played an important role helping to move ideas from the laboratory to industry.

T-Ray Sciences Inc., Waterloo, ON

T-Ray Science Inc. is seeking to revolutionize the way skin cancer is diagnosed and ultimately cured by introducing a new platform of portable scanning devices that can be used in medical offices, skin care clinics, and other non-hospital locations. The platform is being developed using non-invasive terahertz radiation, which is emerging as a safe, accurate and economical option to other scanning alternatives such as high frequency ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and near-infrared imaging. The company’s value proposition resides in building an economical technology that will address the widespread need for early skin cancer diagnosis in a cost effective manner.

The company's terahertz technology is also suitable for dental imaging, numerous pharmaceutical applications, wellness industry applications, and postal security.

The company works with a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, including Dr. Daryoosh Saeedkia, coordinator of the Microwave and Terahertz Photonics Integrated System Lab and Chief Technology Officer at
T-Ray Sciences. CMC has played an on-going role supporting his university-based research, including providing access to industry-grade design tools and fabrication services. With CMC’s support, he has developed a terahertz spectroscopy setup at the university to test and characterize terahertz devices and systems. CMC’s support has been critical to moving this university-developed research to the marketplace.

Ukalta Engineering, Edmonton, AB

Ukalta Engineering is focused on bringing a multidisciplinary approach to solving problems in the wireless test equipment domain. With seasoned ASIC and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) design experience, and advanced knowledge of wireless communication systems, Ukalta is strategically positioned as an engineering solutions provider in the wireless industry. The company is focused on delivering cost-effective products and services by specializing in digital baseband fading channel simulators. 

By addressing time-to-market challenges, this targeted approach will help improve the design and development cycles of wireless products. The company is a University of Alberta spin-off founded by six graduate students from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Incorporated in Alberta, it is founded by John Koob, Tyler Brandon, Leendert van den Berg, Maziyar Khorasani, Amir Alimohammad, and Saeed Fouladi Fard.

During their post-graduate research, CMC supplied the founders with access to industry-grade tools and
technology that enabled the development of an early proof-of-concept prototype. The result was the development of key intellectual property–a new efficient hardware model of distortions caused to signals as they propagate through radio channels–that eventually led to the founding of Ukalta Engineering.


Virtuistix Inc., Winnipeg, MB

Virtuistix Inc. is a provider of mobile medical information management systems by way of pervasive or ubiquitous health computing. The company focuses on eHealth, specifically in developing technology to prevent adverse drug events through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) and smart medical devices. At present, they are in the process of capturing intellectual property related to medical point of care engineering systems and devices.

This University of Manitoba startup was founded by Blake Podaima and is built on the research conducted in collaboration with his former academic supervisor, Dr. R.D. McLeod, Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.  The research team benefited from access to industry-grade tools and technologies delivered by CMC, specifically the CMC-managed System-on-Chip Research Network (SOCRN), which was instrumental to developing the RFID-SoC technology that is the foundation of Virtuistix Inc. 

WICHIP Technologies Inc., San Jose, CA

WICHIP Technologies Inc. is a hardware design company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company delivers high quality IP Camera products based on H.264 cores, multimedia solutions, and services in system design and intellectual property core development. Its products target emerging markets in image and video processing applications within the consumer electronics and security industries, such as portable video devices and remote surveillance systems. WICHIP also has another design center in Hanoi, Vietnam.

WICHIP was founded by Huy Quach, a former graduate student supervised by Dr. Anh Dinh at the University of Saskatchewan. During his post-graduate studies, he used a variety of infrastructure provided by CMC including field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototyping platforms and computer aided design tools such as MATLAB from The MathWorks Inc.  The knowledge and know-how he acquired was instrumental in enabling the startup company.

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