Insider Only Techopia, Top Stories

Next-gen microchip-maker Ranovus to double size of Kanata manufacturing plant

July 3, 2024
3:55 PM
ET

Ranovus says it will expand its Kanata facility to 30,000 square feet from its current 15,000 square feet within the next 12 months as it ramps up production of its next-generation chips that are engineered to be more energy-efficient and cost-effective than current products.

Already an Insider? Log in

Get Instant Access to This Article

Become an Ottawa Business Journal Insider and get immediate access to all of our Insider-only content and much more.

Learn More and Become an Insider

A Kanata-based tech firm plans to double the footprint of its R&D and manufacturing hub in the National Capital Region as demand for its cutting-edge computer chips grows. Ranovus says it will expand its Kanata facility to 30,000 square feet from its current 15,000 square feet within the next 12 months as it ramps up production of its next-generation chips that are engineered to be more energy-efficient and cost-effective than current products. “It’s been very good progress so far, so we wanted to commit to more (production) in the region,” Ranovus co-founder and CEO Hamid Arabzadeh told Techopia in a recent interview. Now at about 110 employees, the company plans to hire dozens of additional workers at its assembly plant on Hines Road as it accelerates toward its goal of producing 100,000 chips annually at the facility. The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced last week it was providing Ranovus with a $4.8-million loan to help finance the firm’s expansion. Ranovus said it will pitch in an additional $20 million on top of the $100 million it has already committed to the research and manufacturing of its semiconductor technology. Since it was founded in 2012, the Kanata-based company has partnered with a number of organizations, including the National Research Council, to develop computer chips that are faster and more energy-efficient. The firm says its fibre-optic chips use 75 per cent less energy than today’s chips powered by electrical circuits. While Ranovus has poured tens of millions of dollars into building a better microchip, the company has been content to stay under the radar and let other firms in the Kanata tech park capture headlines. Over the last 12 years, the firm has raised about $100 million through a combination of venture capital and government funding to get its patented fibre-optic technology ready for market. Arabzadeh notes that demand for data has skyrocketed in recent years with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. That requires more efficient microchips to process all that information. “If you want to double capacity, you have to find different architectures to build it with,” Arabzadeh explained in a 2023 interview. “Most (semiconductor firms) go on a cost play and say, ‘We’re cheaper.’ And we are cheaper than others … but more importantly, it’s the power-consumption savings. “It’s a massive reduction in power for the same speed and same performance. Nobody (else) is doing this anywhere in the world.” While many of the components for its chips come from other parts of the world, Ranovus tests and assembles all of its products in Kanata. The company won’t publicly identify its suppliers or production partners, but Arabzadeh says Ranovus has “quite a few Canadian participants” in its supply chain, including multinational companies with operations in the Ottawa and Montreal regions. Those local connections generate spinoff effects that go far beyond the production of Ranovus’s chips, he adds. “It’s not just what we spend, but it’s really the way we attract these other (companies) to want to be around us,” Arabzadeh explained. “It’s nothing compared to what Nortel had done, but the approach of it is the same – meaning that if you keep the IP here and it’s owned by Canadian companies, then other people come to learn from that IP or support that IP.” The veteran tech executive predicts the market for Ranovus’s ultra-efficient microchips will grow exponentially in the coming years, with millions of graphics processing units – the electronic circuits that perform the high-speed mathematical calculations required for machine learning and other applications – being produced annually. But for now, he says the company lacks the capacity to manufacture chips at that scale, in part because it must rely on foreign suppliers for many of the components. “To be able to participate at those levels, we need a much, much stronger supply chain in Canada,” Arabzadeh said. “Right now, we don’t have it. “A country that has not built anything cannot just say, now we’re going to be building a million (chips) per month or something. It’s a journey. We’ve sort of set our eye on a level that we think the supply chain here in Canada can support.”