Dr Michael Hochberg of Elenion Technologies LLC

Abstract:  20 years ago silicon photonics was mostly a research curiosity, and large-scale integrated photonics on a chip was very far from being reality.  Today, silicon photonic chips are the fastest growing technology platform for intra-data center, telecom and data center interconnect applications.  We’re building chips with literally terabits of capacity, and there’s a clear roadmap to 10’s of terabits per second out of single chips. Furthermore, an entire generation of new silicon photonics based technologies, beyond moving data through fibers, is looking like it will become commercially practical in the coming years. Having crossed back and forth between academia and industry a couple of times, I’ve had the opportunity to develop an unusual perspective on the evolution of the field.  In this presentation, I intend to talk a bit about the history of silicon photonics, and the evolution of challenges and opportunities over time.  Then I’ll cover what we’ve been doing at Elenion, and where I see the field moving over the next few years. 

Biography:

Michael’s career has spanned the space between fundamental research and commercialization since his time as an undergraduate in physics at Caltech.   During their first year as undergraduates, he and his collaborator, Tom Baehr-Jones, created a design tool for the accurate simulation of silicon photonic components as part of their research, and spun the effort off as a company called Simulant.  He co-founded his second photonics company, Luxtera, during his senior year.  After returning to Caltech for his post-graduate degrees, he completed his MS and Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech in a total of three years, and he won the annual Caltech award for best thesis in nanotechnology when he graduated. Since that time, Michael has held faculty positions and run research groups at the University of Washington, University of Delaware, and the National University of Singapore, and has held faculty appointments in various departments including Electrical Engineering, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, and Materials Science. 

Michael was the director of the OpSIS foundry-access service, which built a community of hundreds of silicon photonic designers around the world. OpSIS was the first organization to offer silicon photonic multi-project wafer runs including a library of passive devices, high-speed modulators and detectors, and an integrated PDK. Michael has won a number of awards for his work, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Program Award, a Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship, and a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, which is the highest honor granted by the US government to young scientists. He has published numerous papers and patents, and his work has been cited over 9,000 times in the scientific literature. He is currently the CTO and co-founder of Elenion, a silicon photonics company building and selling coherent transceivers.

Email:

Address:New York, New York, United States