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Nov. 9, 2004 – Edmonton was known in the 1800s as a fur-trading post. In the 1900s, it gained fame for its oil and gas industry. This century, it appears to be evolving into Canada’s showcase for micro and nanotechnologies, and a possible world leader in their commercialization.
Edmonton is home to Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT), an integrated, multidisciplinary institution on the University of Alberta’s main campus. Operated as a partnership between Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) and the university, and jointly funded by the Canadian government and the province of Alberta along with the university, NINT involves researchers in physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, informatics, pharmacy and medicine.
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A new $31-million NINT building now under construction is designed to be one of the world’s most technologically advanced research facilities. It will house Canada’s quietest laboratory with ultra-low vibration, minimal acoustical noise and electromagnetic interference, and constant temperature and pressure-optimal conditions for nanoscale research.
The $31 million, though, represents just one-third of the $93 million that will be spent on NINT during its first five years, with the balance allotted to equipment, staffing and operations.
The institute is temporarily being housed in university facilities, with the new building scheduled for completion in the fall of 2005. When fully staffed, it will hold more than 120 permanent researchers, several hundred graduate students and visiting scientists. NINT is expected to position Alberta at the forefront of molecular and quantum computing by 2010.
For Nils Petersen, who became NINT’s director general as of this month, the institute’s interface between the university and industry was a drawing factor.
“It will couple the free-thinking excellence of the university with the more strategic thinking of NINT and direct some of those key concepts into manufacturing,” said Petersen, a biochemist and who served as vice-president of research at the University of Western Ontario.
“The general atmosphere in the community here is that everyone really wants to see this work; you get the sense that everyone is there to make it work,” Petersen said.
NINT is just one component of Edmonton’s developing NanoMEMS cluster, which also includes 24 micro and nano companies.
The Center of Excellence in Integrated NanoTools (CEIN), an initiative supported by Sun Microsystems and Alberta Innovation and Science, was launched in 2003 at the university to provide computational tools to model, simulate, integrate and visualize micro and nanoscale systems.
Funding for the initiative officially was announced in 2004. Meanwhile, the $15.5-million Micromachining and Nanofabrication Facility (NanoFab), also located at the university, received additional funding earlier this year to acquire equipment as it bolsters its state-of-the-art instrumentation for the creation of micro and nano devices.
The 5-year-old NanoFab shows that Edmonton isn’t a newcomer to small tech. Since it began in 1999, more than 275 researchers from seven universities, five research institutes and 11 companies have taken advantage of NanoFab’s services.
“We’re low-key in some ways,” said Brian Moore, chief technical officer of BigBangwidth Inc., an Edmonton company using high-bandwidth connection technology developed at NanoFab to speed up data transfers. “We have the three pillars to success — ideas, infrastructure and people. So from those perspectives Edmonton is hot.
“What we forget to tell people is that we were doing things 10 years ago others are now only turning into commercially viable products,” he said, citing work in atomic force microscope tips, silicon integrated microphones and microfluidics.
“All of that happened here in Edmonton and that level of discovery still happens here every day,” he said.
Moore credits the head start to the provincial government of then Alberta Premier E. Peter Lougheed in the 1970s and ‘80s and its strong commitment to the province’s educational system.
“The people at that time had a good vision. They realized that not everything could be based on oil and gas,” said Moore, referring to Alberta’s main economic engine.
Tying together Edmonton’s growing micro and nano community is NanoMEMS Edmonton, formalized as the region’s cluster organization last year. A public-private partnership, it includes business and industry, government, and academic and institutional research and development.
Designed to promote the growth of micro- and nano-enabled commercial enterprises, NanoMEMS Edmonton’s original plans for 2004 were to do baseline work in industry analyses, business and trade development, marketing and communications.
But instead the group focused in September on the opportunity to host the 2004 Commercialization of Micro and Nano Systems (COMS) conference, said Leigh Hill, director of NanoMEMS Edmonton and cluster program manager for microsystems and nanotechnology with the Edmonton Economic Development Corp.
“COMS was an opportunity for Edmonton to showcase some of the key elements that are already here and underscore our future potential,” said NINT’s Petersen. “We talked directly with a number of people in Germany, Japan and the United States about potential interactions over the next many months.”
For COMS 2004 co-chair Chris Lumb, also CEO of Micralyne Inc., one of Edmonton’s leaders in MEMS manufacturing, the past is a pretty good indicator of the region’s future role.
“Because we’ve been in it longer, I think our basic approach runs counter to exclaiming about everything we do. We build incrementally, based on real business needs that are sustainable. That’s our approach. It provides a lot of good, long-term traction.”