As Canada looks how best to grow its semiconductor industry during a period of economic and political uncertainty, there is a consensus that it has strong design capabilities that must be expanded, with talent acquisition and retention seen as the biggest challenges.
“From a design perspective, we are very, very strong, and it’s not something that should just be taken for granted,” Avinash Persaud, VP of the hardware catalyst initiative and semiconductor initiatives at ventureLAB, said in an interview with EE Times. “It’s not like you just shake the apple tree and the apples fall off. You have to create an environment where we retain talent. You have to nurture it.”
The trap Canada must avoid is sitting on its laurels and making sure it owns the design work rather than just being a country where design work is done by international companies. “We also need to own the design vision,” Persaud said. “If we have more entrepreneurs who are driving the vision about the technology that we want to design for, the more vibrant the ecosystem will be.”
He said both policy makers and the public need to be made aware of the economic value of the semiconductor industry, including the roles of design. “Ownership is also critically important, especially with the turbulence we’re seeing in the tech sector.”
Maintaining ownership is proving to be a challenge in Canada’s semiconductor sector as homegrown companies get acquired by international companies. Qualcomm, which already has a strong design presence in Canada, recently acquired Alphawave Semi, while AMD recently scooped up the entire engineering team of Untether AI without acquiring the entire company, which is winding down. AMD already has a strong Canadian presence just north of Toronto, in part due its acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006.
Siemens EDA acquired Mentor Graphics eight years ago, and despite the challenges of retaining talent, the Saskatoon-based organization has managed to keep most of its recruits, Aaron Genest, senior AE manager at Siemens EDA, said at the recent Chips North Executive Summit.
Culture, training bolster retention
Genest, who precedes the acquisition, said the company had “every advantage in the world,” but it was said with the sarcasm that comes with living in a city that has no direct flights into it as well as extreme cold in the winter and extreme heat in the summer. “It has virtues, but you have to really work to find them,” he said.
Mentor Graphics wanted to build a world-class R&D facility with technical sales on top, Genest said. By the time Siemens acquired the company, it had nearly 50 employees. “We needed to figure out how we’d done that and articulate it to our new, multinational owners,” he said. “We needed to continue doing it.”
Mentor Graphics had been hiring “socially,” Genest said, which was a common approach for a startup, which wasn’t going to be sustainable at scale, but it had built a great relationship with the University of Saskatchewan to help foster the development of semiconductor-related curriculum.
He said the key to attracting talent and keeping it has been thinking about what made the organization special in terms of its culture and why it kept people from wanting to leave. Genest was employee No. 14 at Mentor Graphics, and a great number of the first 40 employees still work at Siemens. “There was something that we had managed to capture there,” he said.
Scaling up the semiconductor talent pool for Siemens EDA in Saskatoon has meant a commitment to internal training of people who don’t have direct experience with semiconductors, Genest said, because there aren’t people with five to 10 years of experience in electronic design automation. “Those people simply don’t grow on trees; they’re made,” he said. “If we wanted to get them, we had to make them.”
Genest said the high retention rate at Siemens EDA is high because of that investment in people. “Even if we do lose them, we’re losing them to our customers who are then going to go and use our tools.”
Universities, immigration fill talent pipeline
While many global players expand into Canada to acquire R&D and design capabilities, Astera Labs has grown in Canada through expansion. Sagar Satish, associate vice president, said in an interview with EE Times that the country boasts top caliber talent when it comes to semiconductor design, as well as research and development, thanks to excellent universities and co-op programs, which is why global companies have set up shop in the country. “We really have cream-of-the-crop engineering talent,” he said.
His own personal experience as a graduate of the University of Toronto included a 16-month internship at AMD in Canada, which allowed him to work on cutting-edge technology.
Building teams does require veterans, Satish said, but fresh graduates and interns provide a critical pipeline that fuels a cycle of engineers training engineers who become leaders in semiconductor design and research.
Astera, which has offices in Toronto and Vancouver, sponsors many immigrants to come to Canada to work, Satish added. “Canada allows for you to open up an opportunity for them locally.” However, he added, Astera has seen that talent leave for its locations because they don’t see a path to permanent residency and citizenship due to changes in government policy. “That’s a loss for our site.”
Recruiting software talent for semiconductor design remains a formidable pain point. Satish said Astera struggles to find it in Toronto but has better luck in Vancouver. He said university programs are geared toward high-level AI application software, not embedded systems.
Satish said the recent acquisitions of Alphawave and Untether AI speak to the innovative talent pool that’s available in Canada and attractive global players, but it’s an example of how Canadian companies hit a wall when it comes to how quickly they can scale and grow. “When it comes to the R&D and design, we have the capabilities, but what does the whole complete picture look like if we are going to build the next Qualcomm here in Canada?”
Overall, AI is driving where money is being spent, Satish said, and that’s heavily influencing the direction of semiconductor design in Canada. “That’s what’s going to drive the market, the talent, what people want to study, what people want to do.”
More commercialization, promotion required
VentureLAB’s Persaud said AI has had a seismic influence on the development of Canada’s semiconductor design capabilities—both in hardware and software—but there needs to be the understanding that there’s more to participating in the AI value chain than setting up data centers. “There isn’t always that level of awareness that AI is powered by hardware technologies,” he said.
Among the other areas that Canada could further excel in are power management, such as GaN and SiC technologies, as well as photonic interconnects, Persaud said.
He said Canada doesn’t always do a great job of commercializing its own intellectual property, which is what ventureLAB is focused on. “If it’s stuck in the universities, we’re not leveraging it, we’re not commercializing it. This could be an asset to help us develop domestic capabilities.”
Garry Chan, head of AI initiatives at ventureLAB, said the building blocks, skills, and desire are there to make Canada a semiconductor design leader, but there needs to be a vision that drives the conversation to get the country ahead of the curve while also creating more synergy between hardware and software design.
Chan said Canada’s track record of supporting seminal research by the likes of Geoffrey Hinton might suggest that the country should double down on research. “We actually need to push it further out on the applied side, on the scaling side, on the business side, because that’s where the opportunities are,” he said. “We should take a more systemic, global virtuous cycle view.”
While major companies like Qualcomm and AMD know what Canada is capable of, the country needs to do a better job of promoting its capabilities in semiconductor design, Chan said, as it will help attract talent. “We need that influx of talent,” he said. “Socializing the success and vibrancy of this industry in Canada is something that we can do more of.”
6/25/2025 | Elektrik - Elektronik Mühendisliği
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