Jean-Louis Malinge - EEWeb

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INTERVIEW Jean-Louis Malinge How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start? As you probably already noticed from my name, I am of French origin. I am a physicist by training and received my education in France in the 70s. When I was Jean-Louis Malinge - CEO and President Koturaas it initially searching for work, I was looking at industries or technologies that were at the very beginning of their life, and showed promise for success, which brought me to two areas. One was gallium arsenide devices because this was before the time that silicon was as available is today, and gallium arsenide was a good material system for fast electronics. The other area was optical fiber. I ended up randomly starting in optical fiber and photonics for communications and joined a company named Thompson CSF, a very large group in France. I started to work initially in the design and development of the first fiber optic communication line in France, which was in downtown Paris at the end of the 70s. I then migrated progressively to work on the design and realization of the first broadband network of what was one of the first Fiber to the Home (FTTH) demonstrations. At the end of the 1980s, I joined Corning Inc., which is a large fiber optics company headquartered in upstate New York. I started working for Corning in France, migrated to the US in the early 1990s. After that, I went through an executive MBA at Sloan School at MIT and joined the US side of Corning, working EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community Visit www.eeweb.com 4 FEATURED INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW first in development, and migrating progressively to the business side. By the end of the 1990s, I was running a large division of Corning focused on optical components. When telecom collapsed in 2001, all of the companies in telecom and photonics experienced a very sudden large revenue decrease and had to restructure their assets. In 2004 we started Kotura, where I am now, to focus on the next wave of photonics in the network using silicon as the material system of choice to design, develop and manufacture opto-electrical components. How did you initially form your company? Was it yourself and other people? Kotura is the restart of a startup that was created during the Internet bubble days in 2000. By 2003 and 2004, the original company was going nowhere, so the investors decided to restart the company at which time I joined as the CEO. At that point, Kotura had no product sales, but there was a base of technology and engineers. We restarted the company during the worst period of time for photonics because it was very difficult to talk about photonics and communication in the same sentence and be able to raise any money. Can you tell us about the company—some of the products you guys have developed over time or areas of development that have gained traction? The goal of Kotura is to build optical components on the same material and using the same platform that we do to manufacture integrated circuits. Until recently, all of the photonics components that are used in telecommunication networks are based on a multitude of platforms and materials that are assembled together in modules to create a particular function, for example, an optical transmitter or an optical receiver. In a nutshell, our objective is to use the experience The goal of Kotura is to build optical components on the same material and using the same platform that we do to manufacture integrated circuits. and the learning curve of the entire IC industry in silicon and reuse the materials base to manufacture photonics components. In 2006, we started to ship products in volume completely based on this silicon photonics platform. Currently, our products are used by three of the top five telecom companies and dozens of smaller companies running live voice and Internet traffic all over the world. Our devices have logged over 1 billion hours in the network, gaining us credibility with our customers and demonstrating the quality and reliability of our products. Every few years, we are developing a new generation of those chips – some are enhancements of a previous design, but some are brand new devices that we are trying to bring to the market. We are currently working on a design that can transport 100GB of data over a single fiber for distances up to 10km while consuming less than five watts of power. These chips are quite complex; they integrate Wavelength Multiplexing and Demultiplexing on the chip, and they are much smaller than a postage stamp. They will enable high speed links between routers and servers in the data center, which is really where we are aiming our technology. Do you have a fab or are you a fabless company? We have a small fab that is doing two things for us: it provides quick turnaround on new designs, and it manufactures the products that we are sending to different OEMs. We start with bare CMOS wafers, then we fabricate all of the optoelectronic functions on them. Those wafers are diced and packaged by a contract manufacturer in Asia. Our finished products are shipped to key customers around the world. Besides the standard products that you are currently making, do you license your technology if people would like to include some of this photonic technology in an IC design they might be working on? We are engaged in discussions about licensing technology. Since we founded the company, we have created a lot of patents. Kotura currently has around 140 patents on our silicon photonic products and design. Of those, there are 70 granted patents and 70 applications. EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community Visit www.eeweb.com 5 FEATURED INTERVIEW
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