Development support in microsystems and nanotechnologies

Guest: Gord Harling, president & CEO of CMC Microsystems

Founded in 1984, CMC Microsystems Corp. is a not-for-profit organization that operates by helping researchers and industry across Canada’s National Design Network. The group’s work involves lending assistance in the development of innovations in microsystems and nanotechnologies.

In conversation with EP&T Editor Stephen Law, Gord Harling touches on a number of projects and initiatives currently underway at CMC. Those include:

• An IoT device design using Bluetooth and accelerometer, temp sensor, etc. for free on CMC’s GitHub repository. So far it has been used to create a backpack for an untethered rat and can monitor its brain chemistry.
• CMC has a 32bit RISC-V core design available for free on GitHub and it is going into fabrication so that demo boards will be available soon. CMC is also working on a 64-bit core with a 64 bit vector scalar processor.
• CMC has facilitated 29 projects in quantum coding over the past three years, mainly for academics, but also for start-ups. The group has also been running CMC Basecamp training for people to design their own superconducting devices and quantum photonics.
• CMC also has a broad offering in high performance computing from an 8 PetaFLOP AI training system, a 2 PetaFLOP inference system from Untether AI, a 42 TeraFLOP compute cluster, FPGA cluster and other hardware coming. All of this is available to academic researchers for $1,000 per year (with no usage fees) or to start-ups for $2,000 per year under our VIE program.

Gord Harling
Gord Harling is an R&D veteran with telecom and semiconductor firms in Canada, he also has more than two decades of experience working in conjunction with tech start-ups. Harling provides our listeners with an intro profile on CMC Microsystems along with details to