Lazaridis puts $100 million into research centre
Inventor of Blackberry wants his money to help ‘break the known laws of physics’
Mike Lazaridis, whose invention of the BlackBerry smartphone more than a decade ago redefined the way people send email, is drawing inspiration from the early days of computing for his next act.
Backed by his $100-million donation, the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre opens Friday in Waterloo, Ont., aiming to recreate the conditions that made AT&T Inc.’s Bell Labs a hive of technological innovation in the early 1960s and laid the groundwork for the success of Silicon Valley.
The new research centre is designed to produce breakthroughs in the science and technology of things approaching the size of an atom.
It’s “absolutely” going to be the Bell Labs of the 21st century, Lazaridis said in a telephone interview. “That reality got clearer and clearer to me as we got closer to the ribbon-cutting.”
Lazaridis, who resigned as chairman of struggling BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. in January, says he’s now devoting most of his time to help get the Quantum-Nano Centre off the ground and to form a cluster of cutting-edge research with the decade-old Institute for Quantum Computing and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, both founded with a total of more than $250 million of his own money and additional funds he helped raise.
The facilities will be enough to lure the brightest minds in the field to Canada, Lazaridis said.
“We can’t offer them ocean, beaches or mountains, but we can try and offer them the best environment, the best collaborators, the best equipment that would be conducive to them making the breakthroughs of their lifetime,” Lazaridis said. “One of the best ways to describe this is we’re trying to break the known laws of physics.”
The technology Lazaridis is talking about is designed to redefine the boundaries of Moore’s Law, the principle — associated with Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore — that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Quantum computing and nanotechnology would allow medicine to be delivered to individual cells, could create minute energy sources and could even produce self-healing materials that could be used in a nuclear power plant, he says.
“It’s getting more and more difficult to make smaller devices as we approach the size of an atom, but it’s also getting more expensive to build those devices,” he said. “You know you’re at the limit when those two things happen. The only way we can break through those barriers is quantum computing.”
While Lazaridis said he’s considering investments in nano and quantum technology, he wouldn’t say when or how much he’ll invest. The 51-year-old still owns 29.7 million shares in RIM, which are worth about $214 million, according to an April filing.
“I do have the funds to invest in both angel and venture capital, but I’m being very, very strategic,” he said.