13:05 – 14:00
Panel Session: How Silicon Photonics is set to transform interconnect architecture for AI
Moderator
Kevin Soukup
GlobalFoundries
Kevin Soukup is Senior Vice President of Silicon Photonics Product Line at GF, a position he was appointed to in 2024. In this role, Mr. Soukup leads the company’s Silicon Photonics business that enables customers to transport enormous volumes of data through high-speed, power efficient electro-optical systems.
Prior to his current role, he served as Chief Strategy Officer developing the company’s integrated strategy and ensuring that GF has the management systems in place to deliver. Mr. Soukup joined GF in 2011 and held positions of increasing responsibility in technology development and manufacturing operations for the next seven years. In 2018, Kevin transitioned to VP of Business Transformation and helped prepare GF for IPO in 2021.
Before his career with GF, Mr. Soukup spent eleven years with Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor unit in engineering and operations management positions.
Mr. Soukup holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida. He currently serves as a member of the board of directors of VueReal.
GlobalFoundries
Company Profile
GF is one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers and the only one with a truly global footprint. We are redefining innovation and semiconductor manufacturing by developing feature-rich process technology solutions that provide leadership performance in pervasive high growth markets. As a steadfast partner, with a unique mix of design, development and fabrication services, GF works collaboratively alongside our customers to bring a broad range of innovative products to market. With a global customer base, a talented and diverse workforce and an at-scale manufacturing footprint spanning three continents, GF is delivering a new era of more.
Panelist
Near Margalit, Ph.D.
Broadcom
Dr. Near Margalit has held several executive positions in the optical connectivety industry. He founded Zaffire Inc., a metro DWDM Optical Networking company before moving on to lead Source Photonics as CEO from 2002-2013, growing the company to one of the premier optical transceiver vendors. He was the CTO and Head of Product Development for Intel’s Silicon Photonics for the commercial introduction of Silicon Photonics in 2015-2016. From 2018 to present he has been with the Optical Systems Division of Broadcom where he is currently the VP and General Manager of the division. He holds a Ph.D in Optoelectronics from UC Santa Barbara and a B.S. in Applied Physics from CalTech.
Broadcom
Company Profile
Broadcom Inc. designs, develops, and markets digital and analog semiconductors. The Company offers wireless RF components, storage adapters, controllers, networking processors, switches, fiber optic modules, motion control encoders, and optical sensors. Broadcom markets its products worldwide.
Panelist
M. Ashkan Seyedi, Ph.D.
NVIDIA
Ashkan Seyedi received a dual bachelor’s in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. from University of Southern California working on photonic crystal devices, high-speed nanowire photodetectors, efficient white LEDs, and solar cells. With a decade of industry experience at Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and now NVidia, Dr. Seyedi has been working on developing high-bandwidth, efficient optical interconnects for exascale, and high-performance computing applications.
NVIDIA
Company Profile
Since its founding in 1993, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been a pioneer in accelerated computing. The company’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, ignited the era of modern AI and is fueling the creation of the metaverse. NVIDIA is now a full-stack computing company with data-center-scale offerings that are reshaping industry.
Panelist
Mark Wade, Ph.D.
Ayar Labs
Mark is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Ayar Labs. His prior roles at Ayar Labs include Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering. He is recognized as a pioneer in photonics technologies and, prior to founding the company, led the team that designed the optics in the world’s first processor to communicate using light. He and his co-founders invented breakthrough technology at MIT and UC Berkeley from 2010-2015 which led to the formation of Ayar Labs. He holds a PhD from University of Colorado.
Ayar Labs
Company Profile
Ayar Labs is disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power. Ayar Labs’ patented approach uses industry standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical based interconnect “chiplets” and lasers to replace traditional electrical based I/O. The company was founded in 2015 and is funded by a number of domestic and international venture capital firms as well as strategic investors. For more information, visit www.ayarlabs.com.
Address: 695 River Oaks Parkway, San Jose, CA 95134
Phone: 650-963-7200
Email: info@ayarlabs.com
Panelist
Philippe Absil Ph.D.
imec
Philippe Absil received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, in 2000. His doctoral work contributed to the early demonstrations of optical semiconductor microring resonators. In the early 2000s, he developed the passive photonics platform technology for Little Optics, Inc., Annapolis Junction, MD USA. From 2013 till 2024 he was VP R&D and the head of the 3-D and Optical I/O Technologies Department at imec and has been responsible for the silicon photonics technology platform development since 2010. Before that he spent seven years managing the advanced CMOS scaling program at imec.Now, Philippe is Vice President of imec.IC-link, Silicon Solutions, that offers unique technology services, leveraging imec’s state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication infrastructure.
imec
Company Profile
Imec is a world-leading research and innovation center in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. Imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of more than 5,500 employees and top researchers, for R&D in advanced semiconductor and system scaling, silicon photonics, artificial intelligence, beyond 5G communications and sensing technologies, and in application domains such as health and life sciences, mobility, industry 4.0, agrofood, smart cities, sustainable energy, education, … Imec unites world-industry leaders across the semiconductor value chain, Flanders-based and international tech, pharma, medical and ICT companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers. Imec is headquartered in Leuven (Belgium), and has research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands and the USA, and representation in 3 continents. In 2021, imec’s revenue (P&L) totaled 732 million euro.
Further information on imec can be found at www.imec-int.com.
Panelist
Matt Traverso
Marvell Technology
Matt Traverso is a Distinguished Engineer for Marvell Technology with a focus on next generation optical interconnect solutions based on silicon photonics. He has led the development of multiple high volume optical module products at 100Gbps and beyond. Matt has been active in the development and definition of optical communications standards and optical form factors since 2000 including as the original editor of the CFP MSA (Multi-Source Agreement). He has dozens of journal publications and has over 30 patents awarded and pending. He graduated from Stanford University in Materials Science & Engineering.
Marvell Technology
Company Profile
We believe that infrastructure powers progress. That execution is as essential as innovation. That better collaboration builds better technology. At Marvell, We go all in with you.
Focused and determined, we unite behind your goals as our own. We leverage our unrivaled portfolio of infrastructure technology to identify the best solution for your unique needs. And we sit shoulder-to-shoulder with your teams to build it. Agile in our thinking, and our partnerships, we look for unexpected connections that deliver a competitive edge and reveal new opportunities. At Marvell, we’re driven by the belief that how we do things matters just as much as what we do. Because, with a foundation built on partnership, anything is possible.
Panelist
David Lazovsky
Celestial AI
Dave Lazovsky is the Co-founder and CEO of Celestial AI, the creators of the Photonic FabricTM. Celestial AI, founded in April 2020, has developed the optical interconnectivity technology platform for AI computing.
Prior to founding Celestial AI, Mr. Lazovsky was a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures. He has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry and over two decades of experience building andleading successful start-ups.
In 2004 Mr. Lazovsky founded Intermolecular, a semiconductor and clean energy R&D and Intellectual Property licensing company. He served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer,President and as a member of the board of directors from September 2004 through October 2014. As President and CEO, Mr. Lazovsky led all aspects of the business through its lifecycle from early-stage start-up to public company. Intermolecular (IMI) went public on the NASDAQ in 2011.
He currently has over 80 issued and pending U.S. patents.
Celestial AI
Company Profile
AI is touching our lives and driving breakthroughs in healthcare, finance, autonomous systems, and countless other domains. Its ability to process vast data, derive insights, and automate complex tasks unlocks new levels of efficiency and innovation. However, the exponential growth of AI workloads demands greater computational power and more efficient data movement. Traditional electronic interconnects are struggling to keep up, necessitating a paradigm shift in AI infrastructure.
The answer is like night and day.
Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric is a revolutionary technology that scales AI compute within package and package-to-package across multiple racks. It forms the foundation for an optical scale-up network, overcoming the physical limitations of electronic interconnects. Offering terabytes of low-latency bandwidth, in-network computing, and high-performance memory, Photonic Fabric heralds a new dawn in AI infrastructure.
Switching to optical interconnects enables larger multi-die packages and bigger scale-up domains, creating a leap into the next decade. Photonic Fabric-based products transform AI data centers, scaling thousands of XPUs across racks, enabling larger models, better reasoning, and more efficient inference. By reducing total cost of ownership, this innovation unlocks new use cases and more profitable GenAI business models.
With an aggressive roadmap, a robust ecosystem of partners, and a tier-one supply chain, Celestial AI isn’t just reimagining AI data centers, it’s delivering an AI-driven, sustainable future. At its core, AI isn’t just about algorithms or hardware, it’s about people. Unlocking creativity, solving humanity’s biggest challenges, and making the impossible possible. The future of AI is here. Intelligence, illuminated.
