Abstract:

In spite of the enormous recession over the last two years, telecom is here to stay as a growth industry in the long term. But demand has dramatically shifted from installing raw capacity to the delivery of highly functional, very cost effective components and systems. Although the clock has been reset, carriers will eventually switch to agile all optical systems because they offer great advantages in cost, efficiency and provisioning  of new services. A drastic R&D cutback at the main equipment suppliers does offer some opportunities for entrepreneurs. There is demand for inexpensive yet flexible components such as small fabrics for switching and protection, tunable lasers for wavelength conversion, variable optical attenuators for power leveling, and devices for dispersion compensation. For many of these applications, MEMS devices remain good candidates as they offer cost effective solutions. We will describe the Xros switch as an example, and illustrate how we arrived at the decision to enter the field, and positioned ourselves.

Brief biography:

Armand Neukermans has been a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for over 35 years and has been interested and followed the development of micromachining for the last 25 years. He received engineering degrees in ME and EE from Louvain University, and a PhD in applied physics from Stanford. He has 35 publications and is inventor or co-inventor of 60 patents in various fields ranging from electron guns and magnetic recording to drug delivery. The companies which he helped develop have a market cap over 5B. As CTO for Tencor Instruments (now KLA/Tencor), he steered the company in the area of new metrology instrumentation for the semiconductor industry, which became instrument standards. For Alza, he conceived a series of novel micromachined drug patches. He was the founder and CTO of Xros/Nortel, which developed a massive micromachined optical cross connect. He was the recipient of the “Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year” award for 2001 from SVIPLA. Presently he is working on implantable hearing aids, and on new methods for the detection of plastic landmines for humanitarian demining, He is a board member of several public and private companies.