On January 3rd, 1977, a group of eight scientists, engineers and technicians started operations as MPB Technologies Inc.
Led by Dr. Morrel P. Bachynski, the company was a spin-off of RCA Canada’s Research & Development Laboratories, formed in conjunction with RCA’s decision to close the Canadian facility.
The Company grew and eventually diversified to include works in Communications, Space, Fusion Technology, Electromagnetics, the Forest Industry, Robotics, and Lasers.
MPB was one of the founding members of the consortium responsible for the design and construction of the Tokamak de Varennes, maintaining an ongoing association with the Centre Canadien de fusion Magnétique (CCFM), and having offices and staff at the facility. MPB was responsible for the design, implementation, operation and maintenance of the data acquisition system, processing and control systems, encoders and decoders, fiber optic links, user interfaces, and RF current drive and heating systems.
Entered the niche market of undersea telecommunications with Undersea Branching Multiplexers (UBMs) and special terminal equipment for TAT-9, the first trans-Atlantic optical fiber system between North America and Europe that provided undersea switching between its five landing points. The UBMs were the first system to have an ASIC deployed undersea, and were designed to the reliability requirement of <0.3 failures in 25 years.
Acquisition of the National Research Council of Canada’s EMC facility in Kanata, Ontario, which was rebranded as the Electronics Test Centre. The facility is NVLAP-accredited with extensive experience in compliance testing to MIL-STD 461, DEF-STAN, RTCA DO, and CE marking for military and commercial products.
Designed and built for the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, the Aquatic Research Facility (ARF) was first deployed on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in May 1996. On this mission, the three experiments carried out were on early embryonic development, ocean ecology, and bone calcium loss.
Prime contractor of a Precarn-funded Quebec consortium for the five-year Telerobotics Development System (TDS) Project. The project developed three advanced prototype systems: a macro robot for large objects, a micro-robot for manipulation of single cell sized structures, and a research robot with a precision of manipulation that surpassed what was possible at the time.
MPB’s Microgravity Isolation Mount (MIM) became a permanent facility on the orbiting space station MIR, logging 3000 hours of experiments between 1996 and 2001. The flight hardware was designed to sense and counter the natural background vibrations that occur in microgravity.
Acquisition of the Alberta Research Council’s Electronics Test Centre facility in Airdrie, Alberta - a natural extension to MPB’s EMI/ETC Test Measurement Facility in Kanata. Both are joined under MPB’s Electronics Test Center banner - etc-mpb.com
MPB’s Flight Sensor Demonstrator (FSD) uses fiber sensors to measure temperature and pressure and is the first full fiber-optic sensor network on a satellite. Launched in November 2009 and still operational today, it collects data on PROBA-2. The system includes twelve temperature sensors, one high-temperature sensor for the thruster, and a pressure/temperature sensor for the xenon propellant tank.
Development of MPBC’s Visible Fiber Lasers, which earned an enviable reputation for beam quality, stability, and reliability. Early and subsequent designs were made in collaboration with input from Stefan W. Hell and Eric Betzig, who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize (along with William E. Moerner) in Chemistry for their different approaches to the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.
Deployment of MPBC’s first Super Raman Pump, and first Cascaded ROPA (Remote Optically Pumped Amplifier) Pump in an OPGW Network. The Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) in Mexico owns and operates an infrastructure of over 65,000 km of fiber optic cables (with a plan to create 15,000 km more). Our equipment has been deployed throughout their network, bridging point-to-point spans up to 380 km at various transport capacities from STM-16 to 10G DWDM.
Deployment of MPBC’s Raman Fiber Amplifiers for the Laser Guide Star, Paranal, Chile. The Raman fiber amplifier technology was first developed and patented by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). MPB Communications Inc. licensed the technology and collaborated with other companies to develop reliable, maintenance-free, ruggedized turn-key systems suitable for installation in the demanding environments typical of astronomical telescopes. The first installation was at the 4LGS Facility - followed by KECK, Gemini North, Gemini South, Subaru... now deployed by all the major 8-10 m ground-based VIS/IR astronomical telescopes around the world.
You can read more about them here
Designed, and built the imaging spectrometer for the first microSat capable of monitoring greenhouse gas (GHG) and air quality gas (AQG) emissions of any industrial site in the world. GHGSat-CLAIRE is the first High-Resolution Emission Monitoring Satellite. It is the pioneer in high-resolution greenhouse gas emissions monitoring from space.
GHGSat IRIS (GHGSat-C1) is an upgraded instrument from GHGSat CLAIRE (GHGSat-D) featuring a high-resolution, narrow-bandwidth imaging spectrometer designed to fly on a 15-kg microSat. With a polar orbit at 500-km altitude, it surveys the earth’s surface with observations of selected 15 × 15 km areas of interest. It senses the luminosity of earth areas in bands relevant to greenhouse gasses such as CO2 and CH4.
