Silicon photonics startup Rockley Photonics expands in Pasadena
Focused on advanced silicon photonics for next-generation data communication networks, Rockley Photonics (Oxford, England and Pasadena, CA) is using its Series A funding for a number of product development and growth initiatives, including the expansion of the company’s managerial/technical talent.
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With the funding, Rockley has added Thomas Schrans, Nathan Farrington, and Guomin Yu to its engineering and product development team in Pasadena, CA.
Schrans will lead Rockley's product development engineering team as the director of product development, bringing 20 years of experience in commercial fiber-optic and photonic devices. Previously, Schrans was co-founder and VP of technology and advanced product development at Kaiam Corporation, a private company commercializing multi-wavelength high-speed fiber-optic transceivers. Before that he was at Santur Corporation where he managed the development of the pioneering 10x10Gb/s C form-factor pluggable (CFP) for 100Gbps Ethernet.
Farrington has joined the company as the director of software and system architecture, where he leads the software and systems engineering team and the design of next-generation datacenter networking solutions. Previously, Nathan was the founder and CEO of Packetcounter, a computer network software and services company and prior to that he was a data center network engineer at Facebook.
Yu is serving as Rockley Photonics' director of high-speed devices. He has had leading engineering roles at startup companies Packet Photonics and Gigoptix and has more than 24 years of experience in the design, fabrication, and testing of photonics components including lasers, photodetectors, waveguide devices, and optical modulators.
Rockley Photonics is establishing a fabless silicon photonics model and infrastructure. It currently has an exclusive partnership with a leading technology institute and is working with university research teams in supportive collaboration roles.
Rockley Photonics was founded by an experienced management team with success in commercializing silicon photonics. Rockley chairman and CEO Andrew Rickman previously founded Bookham Technology in the UK and more recently acted as Chairman of Kotura.
Upon obtaining Series A funding, Rickman said, "I have been closely involved with silicon photonics for 23 years and Rockley Photonics represents the commercialisation of silicon photonics technology in its most exciting form yet. There is strong demand in the market for the speed and integration capabilities that silicon photonics can provide and we aim to apply our experience to enable accelerated adoption of higher bandwidth networks for a faster and more productive internet experience."
SOURCE: Rockley Photonics; http://rockleyphotonics.com/index.php/document-categories/press-releases/10-rockley-photonics-series-a-round/file and http://rockleyphotonics.com/index.php/document-categories/press-releases/14-rockley-photonics-press-release-sept-2-2014/file
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.