What is Canada’s Opportunity?

Semiconductors are the backbone of the modern electronics industry. Most of the time we hear about modern “mega-fabs” from companies like TSMC which manufacture large quantities of silicon semiconductors or about chip design firms like NVIDIA or Intel that design integrated circuits using multiple silicon semiconductors to create the CPUs and GPUs that are the backbone of personal computing as well as large scale datacentres.

However, there is another kind of semiconductor compound semiconductors – so called because unlike silicon semiconductors they are made out of a combination of elements like Indium Phosphide (InP) or Gallium arsenide (GaAs) – that are equally as important to modern advanced technology. Compound semiconductors have different properties that make them unsuitable for general-purpose computing units like CPUs and GPUs. However, they are crucial for rapid information transfer, underpinning all telecommunications and datacommunications, as well as applications such as high-speed signals in 5G, satellite comms and specialized defence radar systems.