DALSA's Involvement

The focus of DALSA's contribution to the center will be in advancing the boundaries of MEMS and Wafer Level Packaging. As a founding partner, DALSA will contribute to the center's MEMS and 3D WLP equipment as well as associated selection, installation and ongoing maintenance and operation. DALSA will develop standard recipes for each of the pieces of MEMS/WLP equipment with the goal of providing a turnkey operation where center members will be able to build a wide variety of prototype devices.

The Innovation Center is a tremendous opportunity for DALSA's future growth. We will have opportunities to work in collaboration with researchers from the University of Sherbrooke and other universities and research centers to speed up technology development. And as we complete the addition of 200 mm MEMS capability to our own foundry, our involvement with the center will allow us to work on the latest 200 mm equipment for advanced prototyping which will allow us to shorten the time to market for our customers. Through the advanced equipment deployed at the center for research, we will gain the ability to introduce gold, copper, and other non-CCD compatible materials to our toolkit of MEMS capabilities, effectively opening up new market opportunities including radio frequency (RF) MEMS and BioMEMS/Lab-on-a-chip.

In the words of DALSA CEO Brian Doody:
"Innovation has been fundamental to DALSA’s past success, and it is equally fundamental to our future. Therefore we are very excited to be a founding partner in the new innovation center’s 200 mm MEMS and 3D microelectronics fabrication unit. We anticipate that the technologies invented and developed in the Center will bring novel capabilities to produce new, integrated, intelligent products to areas such as microfluidics for medical applications and photonics for high bandwidth communication applications. This may be the first time in Canada that such a concentration of diverse areas of research and innovation meet and collaborate under the same roof."

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is funding the Center?
Total investment for this project is $218.45 M. The Government of Canada is contributing $82.95 M and the Government of Quebec is contributing $94.9 M. The balance of the start up funding is being supplied by industry and equipment supplier donations.

The founding institutions, along with any new members that join the Center at a later date along with users of the Center's facilities will fund the ongoing operational costs of the Center. DALSA will be specifically responsible for the ongoing maintenance and operation of the MEMS portion of the Center along with shared funding for common areas. <

Where will the center be located?
The center will be located in the heart of the Technoparc Bromont, in Bromont, Quebec – the semiconductor manufacturing capital of Canada.

What MEMS facilities will the center offer?
The center will house the world’s most advanced 200 mm MEMS/WLP equipment and infrastructure and will focus on solving the industry's most technically challenging problems.

How will the center benefit DALSA's customers?
In addition to collaboration with leading researchers to speed technology development, DALSA will benefit from access to advanced equipment to speed prototyping and reduce time to market for customer designs.

How much business does DALSA do in MEMS?
Our MEMS business has experienced some of the fastest growth among pure-play MEMS foundries: