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.
Your take on this is excellent. I feel like the Canadian political and capital classes have fallen for this belief that if only we incentivize enough private investment, then all our problems can be solved. There has been a serious generational neglect of investment in developing local expertise (see health care, science, infrastructure development, etc etc) because feds and provinces don’t want to fork up the capital to build and maintain the social systems required to develop these expertise.
Privatizing a government R&D program is pretty much the exact opposite thing to do if you want to achieve this. It ensures that priorities will shift away from long term projects and providing consistent work for Canadian scientists and towards the short term thinking of corporations who do not care about building any kind of social or educational infrastructure and only care about juicing as much as they can out of the asset as it exists today.