About UsDiscover new possibilities
with our open platform

Who we are

With decades of experience in photonics design, our executive and engineering teams are delivering the world’s first open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers.

You can improve the performance, power efficiency, and reliability of your design using the OpenLight platform for datacom, telecom, LiDAR, healthcare, HPC, AI, and optical computing applications. With over 200 patents, we’re bringing optical solutions to unprecedented places, and we’re enabling technologies that weren’t previously possible.

Our leadership team

OpenLight leadership brings decades of hands-on experience designing, building, and innovating silicon photonics technology. We’re proud to be pushing forward with an open platform to make our technology widely available to more industries.

Dr. Adam Carter

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Carter has over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, including a variety of roles in Sales, Marketing and General Management in Networking, Optical Communication Systems, Optical Components and Modules markets. Previously, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at Foxconn Interconnect and Oclaro. At Oclaro, he served as a member of the senior executive team when it was acquired by Lumentum Holdings. Prior to that, he served as the Senior Director and General Manager of the Transceiver Module Group at Cisco, where he was instrumental in the acquisition of Lightwire, a Silicon Photonics start-up, and released the first internally-designed 100G transceiver. Dr. Carter holds a B.Sc. (Honors) in Applied Physics from Portsmouth University and received a PhD from the University of Wales, Cardiff, for his research on Reactive Ion Etching of III-V semiconductor materials.

Dr. Thomas Mader

Chief Operating Officer

Dr. Mader’s experience spans 27 years across the photonics and consumer electronics industries. Prior to the formation of OpenLight, he led the same team within Juniper Networks. Dr. Mader’s previous experience includes six years at Intel, where he founded Light Peak, which became Thunderbolt. He drove innovation at Amazon for six years, creating several new devices and features, such as the Amazon Dash Button. Dr. Mader has been an executive at four startups, including LightLogic, Picarro, Radiient, and Klue.

Dr. Volkan Kaman

VP Engineering

Dr. Kaman was formerly the Senior Director of Engineering at Juniper’s silicon photonics group. Before joining Juniper, he was the VP of Engineering at Aurrion Inc. (acquired by Juniper in 2016), which developed the core silicon photonics technology that forms the foundation of OpenLight. Early in his career, Dr. Kaman was Chief Systems Architect and Director of Product Management at Calient Networks. Dr. Kaman holds a PhD from UCSB and a BS from Cornell University, both in Electrical Engineering.

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