With more than $1 billion invested since 2001 and the opening of a $43-million photonics fabrication centre in Ottawa last year, the future is looking bright for Canada's photonics industry.

Information technology's (IT) move from electrical to optical transmission is similar to the jump from telegraph to telephone. Bundling immense amounts of information into little packages of light and sending them down a fibre-optic cable first dazzled engineers in the 1970s, but it's only been during the past five years that photonics has truly earned its place in history.

As the equity-market slump of 2000-2001 dissolved promise after promise in IT, photonics emerged only slightly scarred because, by then, its potential was becoming divorced from the vagaries of the stock market with proven applications in biosciences, nano-scale imaging, remote sensing and perhaps the biggest market of all - health care.

Today, not only has photonics survived, the Canadian Photonics Consortium says it attracted $1.1 billion in new investment between 2001 and 2004. The size of the sector can only be estimated - at about $1.5 billion - because Statistics Canada doesn't regard photonics as a separate industry.

Photos by Ashley Fraser, Business Edge
The Institute of Microstructural Sciences' Sylvain Charbonneau can't help but reflect on how bright the future appears for the Canadian photonics industry.

By late 2002, this survival skill blossomed in Ottawa when Carleton University's Wade Hong sent a record one terabyte of data - about 1,000 gigabytes - from Canada to Switzerland in just under three hours.

Despite the milestone, Hong's experiment wasn't a eureka moment because data transfer had been growing rapidly in size for decades. But it did prompt self-congratulatory smiles at the National Research Council (NRC), which funnelled about $150 million of federal funds into Ottawa's photonics industry between 2001 and 2004, including cash for a facility bureaucrats hope will become the world's top research and development incubator.

Last summer, the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre (CPFC) opened on the NRC's grounds on Montreal Road. The facility, which has more than 100 staff, makes component prototypes and provides instruction to students who want to better understand how photonics processes work.

The long-term plan is to become the nexus for all new photonics applications in Canada - such as new chip materials including gallium arsenide or products such as optical buffers for wireless communications - for an industry that is evolving week by week.

"Our object is to de-risk technology and investment for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and startups. It can cost $5 or $10 million to build a prototype and get it to the beta phase, and this type of maturity doesn't exist yet in photonics," says Sylvain Charbonneau, who oversees CPFC operations as director of applied technologies at the NRC's Institute of Microstructural Sciences.

The centre's $43-million pricetag covers infrastructure and operating expenses for five years. Staff benefit from state-of-the-art equipment that was acquired from over-extended tech companies for as little as 15 cents on the dollar. Any advantage is welcome in the hyper-competitive industry, especially in Ottawa, where government commitment has helped maintain 40 per cent of Canada's photonics businesses and 60 per cent of its investment during the past three years.

This is strong political loyalty in a volatile market, but not a big gamble because the private sector stayed the course during the tech wreck and has managed to attract the majority of new capital to Ottawa, which rebounded to about $500 million in 2004 from about $40 million in 2001, according to the municipal government.

This comes as no surprise to industry watchers because before 2000, Canada led the world in optical products and Ottawa was its biggest player.

"I don't think (Ottawa's industry) survived intact, but it has continued to attract investment and innovative people because it diversified away from telecoms into an amazingly broad number of uses, like laser controls and bio-sensors" says Richard White, CEO of Intelligent Photonics Control, one of 100 members in the Ottawa photonics cluster.

Charbonneau says the fabrication centre will probably recover its infrastructure costs within five years because, unlike many government science projects, its mandate is to help improve and deliver viable products. New clients arrive every month.

A display case at the NRC's Institute of Microstructural Sciences holds fully processed semi-conductor wafers for photonic applications.

"We want to drive the next wave and help Canadian companies capitalize on it," he says.

The local industry is asking researchers to work on inspired applications. Photonics can be used to detect individual cancer cells and control micro-lasers to kill them.

It can bridge the photon-solid boundary and drive remote robots working on nano-scale sites. It can also be used in sensors so small and accurate that only science fiction has been able to conceptualize it for the public - think of a handheld Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI) as Star Trek's tricorder.

The field is wide open. Within the CPFC's ranks there is a sense that there is an opportunity to create a new set of rules, where the convergence of traditional disciplines in science is driven by the cutting edges of photonics and nano-technology.

The centre is a collaboration between the NRC and Carleton, and the relationship not only creates prototypes, it feeds a steady stream of workers into the market.

"We're teaching students to make use of the centre, to see that photonics theory actually has a place to go," says John Armitage, associate dean in Carleton's faculty of science.

"When the boom went bust, many big photonics companies dissolved into small entrepreneurial startups. These provide a huge pool of talented people who are excited by applications that had only been theoretical," he says.

"Telecommunications may still be the biggest (financial) driver, but the real market is in what's yet to come, from inside people's heads."

The key link lies not only in new products but in intellectual property. Armitage sees the CPFC as a much-needed receptacle for keeping home-grown ideas in Canada.

"Not only will the centre draw more companies and skilled people to Ottawa, it will protect against multinational corporation shutdowns and withdrawal of intellectual property, like happened with Alcatel," he says.

The Carleton-CPFC partnership is as much entrepreneurial as scientific. Last year, the university attracted professor Jacques Albert with $900,000 of federal money to open a new lab that tries to make photonics sensors cheaper and more reliable.

The difference with this appointment is that Albert was recruited from the private sector for what he calls his "real-life applications" experience as senior scientist at Alcatel Optronics rather than his academic background.

The primary goal is to make Ottawa one of the world's top incubators for photonics ideas and entrepreneurs.

And evidence of success is already emerging. Last year's annual international conference in Canada's capital city - Photonics North 2004 - attracted 1,500 delegates, almost twice as many participants as similar events in the United States and Europe.

As well, the leading U.S. photonics research university - University of Arizona at Tucson - has a broad R&D relationship with Carleton and last year industry delegations from Ireland, Germany, Taiwan and Australia came first to Ottawa when they wanted to pick brains.

(Mike Levin can be reached at levin@businessedge.ca)