Rockley Photonics appoints Nick Kucharewski as COO
PASADENA, CA – Rockley Photonics, a pioneer in silicon photonics integration for complex digital systems, today announced the appointment of Nick Kucharewski as chief commercial officer.
Established in 2013, Rockley Photonics is a rapidly growing company developing a cost-efficient platform coupling optical interfaces directly with CMOS microelectronics. Kucharewski joins the company as it nears commercial availability of its first product offering, an integrated-optical ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) for next-generation data center networking.
Kucharewski brings to Rockley two decades of experience in semiconductors and network systems. He was most recently Vice President of Product Marketing at Broadcom Limited, where he contributed in a variety of senior roles.
Over an 11-year period, Kucharewski led product teams defining and marketing a series of significant new products for data center and service provider applications. Prior to this, he held engineering leadership roles at Applied Micro and MMC Networks, where he contributed to some of the industry’s first programmable networking silicon.
Kucharewski holds Masters and Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Kucharewski will play a key role as Rockley Photonics prepares to deliver the world’s first product to integrate high-bandwidth packet switching in a component with all-optical network interfaces. Code-named TopangaTM, the Rockley product enables equipment manufacturers to deliver high density solutions at lower cost and power for data center networks. The unique integration of optics and digital electronics in the Rockley Opto-ASICTM enables new topologies that may better handle the bandwidth demands of evolving data-center applications.
Dr. Andrew Rickman, founder and CEO, commented: “Our team has made amazing progress innovating across boundaries to achieve levels of integration with silicon photonics and microelectronics previously unseen in the industry. As we rapidly move to market it is important that we scale our sales, marketing and customer support activities, while working closely with customers to align our next generation products. Nick brings leadership, experience and competence which will enable this next phase of our growth. We are very pleased to have Nick join our team.”
Nick Kucharewski remarked: “The Rockley team has developed an impressive set of new technologies and a plan to manufacture at scale. The close integration of optics and high-density CMOS silicon enables a new approach to network equipment design, and I am excited to join the Rockley Photonics team as it enables worldwide customers with this new technology platform.”