Fidus Systems Inc.’s selection last year as AMD Adaptive Compute Partner of the Year is a reflection of the world-class talent the company has assembled in Ottawa. As the first Canadian company to win the award, Fidus represents a made-in-Canada engineering success story and a high-impact example of Canadian design leadership.
“We are a hardware embedded systems company with our designs in the guts of a car, in the middle of a data center, in a satellite, in a drone, or in medical systems,” explains chief executive officer Alan Coady.
Fidus’ work in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) design for configurable integrated circuit (IC) chips, and other designs, is proof that Canadian engineering firms are more than capable of competing on the global stage when supported and connected to the right ecosystem.
But that excellence in Canadian innovation is being tested by a series of global economic and geopolitical headwinds.
Tariffs, geopolitical threats add urgency to local innovation
Coady says the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 U.S. law, was designed to accelerate research and development within the U.S. in the face of global concerns — especially the threat of a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) manufactures about 60 per cent of all computer chips in the world, and 90 per cent of high-end chips.
Without access to TSMC, production across the globe could “grind to a halt,” says Coady. “Computer chips are in everything today. Cars nowadays have upwards of 5,000 computer chips inside.”
Along with global supply chain instability, tariff threats and other protectionist policies under the Trump administration risk limiting Canadian access to key technologies and markets.
These issues — and more — have made Canadian intellectual property (IP) and the expansion of local innovation capacity even more critical.
Building on public-private collaborations to compete globally
There is, however, a silver lining to these gathering clouds. The situation provides a significant national and regional opportunity for Canada and Ottawa to build on existing public-private collaborations that have provided tangible ways for Fidus, and other Canadian companies, to grow and compete globally.
Coady cites the federal government’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program, and the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), as “great incentivizing vehicles to create IP and to have technical jobs in Canada. They really matter and are very important.”
The SR&ED program helped put Fidus in a position to employ more than 100 people locally (and growing), he explains. And Canada has excellent institutions that produce very qualified workers, including uOttawa, Carleton University, and Algonquin College locally.
But he also says Canada hasn’t always commercialized the IP we produce as well as we should — and that public commercialization advancement programs, similar to the SR&ED and IRAP R&D initiatives, can do even more to help Canadian businesses compete globally.
“We’re in a highly competitive society. Canada has been well-known for great R&D innovation. But we tend to create the R&D, then sell that, often to U.S. companies who build around it, market it, and sell a product. So there’s a lot of money to be made that they make, and we don’t,” says Coady.
‘The blueprint is there — now it’s time to scale’
Coady says he wants this kind of public-private collaboration to go even deeper, with programs like SR&ED and IRAP and others putting the same effort into commercializing and taking to market the IP that’s generated.
He also suggests that the Canadian tax system, along with government-run entrepreneurial funding agencies such as the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), “should be willing and mandated to support Canadian companies going from IP to commercialization, and be willing to take a risk.
“The blueprint is there — now it’s time to scale it and make it work for entrepreneurs at all stages.”
