Electronics component maker Jabil plans to double its headcount in the National Capital Region after opening a new facility to test and package cutting-edge microchips and other photonics technology. The St. Petersburg, Fla.-based company officially opened the new 17,000-square-foot research laboratory at its facility on Brewer Hunt Way in Kanata earlier this month. The expansion […]
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Electronics component maker Jabil plans to double its headcount in the National Capital Region after opening a new facility to test and package cutting-edge microchips and other photonics technology.
The St. Petersburg, Fla.-based company officially opened the new 17,000-square-foot research laboratory at its facility on Brewer Hunt Way in Kanata earlier this month.
The expansion brings Jabil’s total footprint in Kanata to 43,000 square feet. Azmina Somani, the firm’s vice-president of R&D for photonics, says the publicly traded company, which now employs about 40 people in the Ottawa region, expects to hire an additional 40 engineers, technicians and other workers to staff the state-of-the-art facility.
Jabil has been designing, processing and testing electronics components on Brewer Hunt Way since 2014, serving blue-chip customers such as Nokia and Comcast. But much of the assembly of those products was done in Asia, meaning components were “ping-ponging” back and forth over the Pacific multiple times, Somani explained.
“The equipment and the devices travelled long distances and you could not get all the capability in one place,” she said. “This was something missing in the supply chain.”
The new Kanata lab will be a one-stop shop where Jabil’s engineers can design, build and test advanced photonics products for AI and cloud data centre customers under one roof.
For example, its next-generation tools will allow the firm to create smaller and more efficient semiconductors that stack chips on top of each other, Somani said.
The lab also features new soldering ovens that leave behind far less residue than previous methods of assembling chips, creating a smoother path for the high-speed lasers that transmit the data that powers AI and other applications.
“Getting light (from lasers) in and out of components has become a challenging task,” Somani said. “We are gearing up to service that side of the business that’s up-and-coming.”
She says the cutting-edge equipment at the Kanata facility will allow Jabil to test and assemble the latest in photonics technology – including co-packaged optics that use lasers to move data between chips at higher speeds than traditional copper cables while burning far less energy.
The data centres and other infrastructure that form the backbone of AI are notorious energy hogs, some consuming as much energy in a year as hundreds of thousands of homes.
But with co-packaged optics poised to transmit huge amounts of data cheaper and faster than traditional chips, demand for the technology is expected to skyrocket over the next few years as the processors that run AI models get more sophisticated and require ever-faster and more efficient chips.
Somani says the new lab will allow Jabil to more quickly deliver prototypes of new co-packaged optics technology to customers such as Kanata-based Ranovus, a trailblazer in the still-nascent industry.
“Ottawa will play a critical role in accelerating photonics solutions for our customers,” she told Techopia in an interview on Tuesday. “Our customers need to take their AI technologies to the next level, and we want to be a key manufacturer in that area.”
The company says the new site will also serve as a meeting centre, where customers from around the world can learn more about Jabil’s photonics manufacturing capabilities.
Noting the firm has made a “significant investment” in the new lab, Somani said there is still enough space at the Kanata property to double Jabil’s existing footprint. With the current clean room almost at full capacity, she said Jabil is already looking at adding space for more cutting-edge manufacturing technology within the next year or two.
Founded in Detroit in 1966, Jabil has 140,000 employees and operations in 25 countries.
The company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange and is part of the S&P 500 Index, expects to generate revenues of US$29 billion in fiscal 2025.
