We had several consecutive projects with Teledyne DALSA on things, I would say, of a smaller scale and at one point Teledyne DALSA realized that there was an opportunity, in fact, to create something completely new in the field of infrared cameras, technologies that already exist, but that are so expensive to manufacture right now. We have multiple applications on the non-military side, on the civilian side, like environmental monitoring, safety and autonomous nighttime road navigation. All of these applications are in high demand for these technologies, but because they were too expensive to manufacture, it was simply not feasible.

If we had done the project independently, there may have been some avenues that we would not have explored. And maybe it would have led to a product of lower quality. It was only logical to approach the Université de Sherbrooke because of their ability to collaborate, which has enabled us to implement elements that are a bit more fundamental.

Several students of different levels, who participated in the project, were extremely motivated not only by interesting scientific questions, but also by the environment.

As university professors, we are used to working with rather academic equipment, and here at C2MI, we had access to equipment that is of a level that could be used for production. So it really allowed us to work on—to transfer these new processes, more precisely or more quickly, to the industrial partner.

I think that the product we developed, and the product we put on the market is a product that really stands out.

And in fact, the union of cultures has worked so well, and this union really works, in my opinion, when people work in the same physical place. So, the main advantage of C2MI is that manufacturers and universities have offices and workplaces in the same building, which is extremely rare, at least in Canada.