IBM Microelectronics

I joined SkyWater in April of 2025, so I've been there a little more than a year.

Prior to SkyWater, I was three years at, uh, NXP, and then before that I was 21 years at IBM Microelectronics, uh, in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Did multiple process technology generations from 90 nanometer all the way down to seven nanometer.

So my career spans, uh, quite a long, long, long time.

So where do you come in and what role do you play in terms of, you know, companies deciding this technology to use? Yeah.

So, I mean, so GF's role is really, you know, manufacturing very complex technologies at scale, like optical networking, right? So if you look at optical networking, you know, we started building the basic building blocks for optical transceivers in the mid-2000s when we were still, you know, part of IBM Microelectronics, right? So that's where basic research on how to do waveguides, how to do silicon modulators, how to do photodiode integration, right? All those things have been,

you know,

in progress for 20 years and as we're going through and we're doing that basic research work we always have an eye toward hey this needs to go into high volume manufacturing right we need to be able to make millions of these right so all the design choices have to be targeted toward you know at some point this is going to scale to millions of units how do we make sure we scale to millions of units so But, you know, everything that is being defined by, you know, the OCI MSA, by IEEE, it's all based on what silicon technology is going to be available in the timeframe that we're launching, right? You know, when you talk about the next step beyond, you know, so we're at 200 gig per lane now going to 400 gig per lane, right? Does the silicon technology exist to support 400 gig per lane? Do we have modulators that can run with 100 gigahertz of bandwidth? Do we have amplifiers that can run 100 gigahertz of bandwidth? Okay, that's all in place right now.