Imagine you’re a company that’s involved in making products that require high-tech components—or that you have an idea for such a product, and would like to build a prototype. As technology continues to improve, especially in the realm of miniaturization, keeping pace by purchasing your own manufacturing equipment can be prohibitive—inefficient for larger companies, and impossible for smaller ones and startups.
Enter
Celestica, a technology firm that manufacturers components for other tech-reliant companies, such as IBM, for instance. Last month, they opened a microelectronics lab at their Toronto headquarters to help with precisely these manufacturing challenges.
Clients who sign up to partner with Celestica—which will include both small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as startups and original equipment manufacturers—will gain the benefits of a 1,100 square foot lab in which elements like temperature and airborne particles are controlled in order to enable the manufacturing processes involved in miniaturization.
“There are very few place in Canada where companies can go to access this type of technology,” a spokesperson for Celestica told us, and the goal is to enable those companies to commercialize their products more effectively. It will especially help, the spokesperson went on, those who need to do “low-volume, high-reliability manufacturing”—which can range from companies testing out new products, to niche markets (like the aerospace industry) where there just isn’t a need for a large number of items to be produced.
The lab can facilitate the manufacture of fully-designed products, as well as offer engineering expertise to help with design for products that don’t have all their specs nailed down yet. Among the industries that most rely on the optics and photonics technology available at the lab are aerospace, renewable energy, and health care.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Celestica