RIM founder funds high-tech research

Mike Lazaridis, founder of high-tech success story Research in Motion, and his wife have kick-started a $100 million research program at the University of Waterloo (UW) with a $33.3 million donation.

The money, a donation to the university's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), will help "put Canada on the leading edge of the next technological revolution," UW said Friday.

Computers using the technology would be substantially different from today's models, and would have extensive commercial and theoretical uses.

The donation from Lazaridis and his wife Ophelia will be matched by the university and public sources, raising $100 million. The couple both graduated from the university.

Quantum computing is the study of behavior at the atomic level, where the rules are different from the classical laws identified by Issac Newton, the university said.

Lazaridis is chancellor of UW and president and co-CEO of RIM. He was instrumental in founding the Institute for Quantum Computing in 2002, when he gave it $6 million. That money is included in the $33 million total.

In late 2000, he gave $100 million to Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an independent research body which attracted another $20 million from other RIM executives and more than $50 million from the Ontario and federal governments.