Startup Rockley Photonics adds to Pasadena team

Startup Rockley Photonics has added three new executives to its engineering and product development team at its facilities in Pasadena, CA. The company, the latest venture from Bookham Technology founder Andrew Rickman, plans to leverage silicon photonics technology to create what Rickman previously described to Lightwave as "functional blocks" (see "Rockley Photonics looks to leverage silicon photonics at the systems level").

The new hires -- Thomas Schrans, Nathan Farrington, and Guomin Yu – offer the company "capabilities in the design/development of high-speed integrated photonic solutions, along with the system-level implementation and deployment knowledge required for modern datacom architectures," in the words of a Rockley press release.

As the new director of product development, Dr. Schrans will head the company’s product development engineering team. His more than 20 years of experience in commercial fiber-optic and photonic devices includes a stint at tunable laser and transceiver developer Santur (bought by NeoPhotonics) as well as co-founder and vice president of technology and advanced product development at transceiver vendor Kaiam Corp.

Dr. Farrington leaves data center networking software startup Packetcounter, where he was founder and CEO, to become director of software and system architecture at Rockley. (Among his last acts at Packetcounter was co-authoring the article "Building a Data Center Network with Optimal Performance and Economy" in the July/August 2014 issue of Lightwave). Farrington also has experience as a data center network engineer at Facebook. "Nathan’s preeminent network system knowledge and control expertise will be highly useful as we expand the deployment and functionality of optical communication solutions within the datacom network infrastructure," said Aaron Zilkie, Rockley’s vice president of engineering, via the press release.

Yu joins Rockley as director of high-speed devices. His background includes engineering roles at Packet Photonics and GigOptix. He has more than 24 years of experience in the design, fabrication, and testing of photonics components. "Guomin’s tremendous high-speed device capabilities round out the engineering team’s multi-discipline approach to system-level optical integration," explained Zilkie.

The three new hires join Zilkie, Vice President of Business Development Greg Finn, and Rickman (chairman and CEO) as announced members of the Rockley Photonics team.

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