Tom

Biography:

Tom has over 40 years of experience building and leading technologically and geographically diverse software business teams to deliver design automation solutions for electronics, optics, and photonics.

He is currently the CEO of Virtual Sphere LLC, a technical software and photonics consulting group. Prior to that he was Senior Director of Research and Development and Scientist at Synopsys Corporation where he was responsible for all optics and photonics design automation software products. He has experience in M&A and led numerous acquisitions at Synopsys. One of his key accomplishments during that time was the formation of the Photonics Solutions business group bringing together technology from several acquisitions with the existing Synopsys electronic design automation (EDA) tools and partnering with major foundries to develop PDKs that create a new photonic integrated circuit design automation platform.

Prior to the acquisition of Optical Research Associates by Synopsys, he held the position of Vice President of R&D and Software Chief Technology Officer where he was responsible for strategic planning, identifying and providing solutions to new optical design markets such as technical illumination, and served on the board of directors.

He started his career at Rockwell International as an electrical engineer and an early adopter of CALMA electronic computer aided design (CAD) tools, and with the advent of the IBM-PC platform went on lead the internal development of the company-wide PC-based electromechanical CAD design tool.

He has coauthored some outstanding work, including“ Faceted Reflector Design for Uniform Illumination,” presented at the International Open Data Conference (IODC) held in Kona, Hawaii in 1998 and “Illumination Simulation and Future Trends,” presented at 10th Annual International Conference on Optics-photonics Design and Fabrication at Weingarten, Germany in 2016.

Tom received his B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering at California State University, Long Beach in 1984.
He is an active member of several organization: SPIE (senior member), OSA, ACM, and IEEE (senior member) where he chairs the Metropolitan Los Angeles section and the chapter of the Computer Society.
Tom loves hiking in the San Gabriel mountains where he volunteers on the trail maintenance crew, plays golf as often as possible, and sometimes has time to practice his guitar playing.