optical-semiconductor
(3)
Sam Heidari
Dr. Sam Heidari is the CEO of Lumotive, a Redmond, Washington semiconductor company building programmable, all-silicon lidar chips based on its patented Light Control Metasurface technology. An electrical engineer with a PhD from USC and more than 40 patents, Heidari previously ran Wi-Fi chipmaker Quantenna Communications, taking it from zero revenue to a 2016 IPO and a roughly $1 billion sale to ON Semiconductor in 2019. He now serves on and chairs several technology boards and is turning Lumotive's software-defined optics from a lab breakthrough into mass-produced 3D sensing hardware.
Cspeed
Cspeed is a Palo Alto optical semiconductor startup building silicon photonics and high-density III-V laser array technology to replace copper interconnects inside large-scale AI clusters. Founded in 2022 and led by serial semiconductor entrepreneur Sanjai Kohli, the company targets the data-movement bottlenecks that limit 'scale-up' AI infrastructure, aiming to deliver fiber-optic connectivity dense and cheap enough for high-volume datacenter deployment.
Lumotive
Lumotive is a Redmond, Washington optical-semiconductor company that turns beam steering into a chip. Its patented Light Control Metasurface (LCM) technology uses thousands of tunable liquid-crystal optical resonators etched into a CMOS die to steer light electronically - no moving parts - powering solid-state LiDAR, 3D sensing, and, soon, optical switching for AI data centers. Spun out of Intellectual Ventures and Bill Gates-backed metamaterials research, the company sells programmable beamforming chips like the LM10 to sensor and systems makers rather than building full LiDAR units itself.