2024 Siegman International School on Lasers

Adventures in Silicon Photonics

Over the past 25 years, I've had the privilege of occupying a front-row seat in the development of silicon photonics from a lab curiosity into a multi-billion dollar business.  It's been an amazing ride, and some interesting patterns have emerged.  Ideas that used to be heretical have become orthodox.  While the field has made incredible progress, there's a lot left to do.

This talk will cover a few topics of interest to students in the field:

• The historical evolution of the field of integrated optics and silicon photonics in particular
• Some predictions for the next decade
• Structural opportunities for new startups in the field
• Organizational design, business plans and the choices between venture-backed and bootstrapped businesses in the space
• The difference between real and fake risk
• How to use your PHD as an opportunity to incubate a startup

About the Speaker

Michael Hochberg’s career has spanned the space between fundamental research and commercialization for 25 years. He founded four silicon photonics companies - Simulant, Luxtera, Elenion, and SLS - each of which was acquired; Luxtera was acquired by Cisco and Elenion was acquired by Nokia, where Hochberg served as the CTO of the Optical Subsystems group. Hochberg has been heavily involved in a number of fields, including integrated biosensors, telecommunications, data center interconnects, supercomputing, AI hardware, quantum computing and sensing, integrated photonics, design services, digital and microwave integrated circuits, and simulation software.

During his time as a faculty member, he directed OpSIS, the first organization to offer silicon photonic multi-project wafer runs, pioneering the creation of integrated PDK's for photonics. He authored, with his colleague Lukas Chrostowski, the most widely used textbook in silicon photonics and he’s co-authored over 100 papers and patents, publishing in journals including both Science and Nature. His publications have been cited over 17,000 times. Michael won a number of awards for his work, including a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, which is the highest honor granted by the US government to young scientists. Additionally, Michael is also an Optica fellow.

Michael was thrown out of high school in Louisiana and then attended a free, public residential boarding school. He ended up doing all of his degrees at Caltech, completing his MS and PHD in a total of three years and winning the best thesis award in nanotechnology. In his spare time, he enjoys photography, sporting clays, and writing about issues of policy, geopolitics and grand strategy. His work on those topics has been published in the National Review, the Hill, Fast Company and the Naval War College Review, among others.