Photonic Switching for AI Infrastructure Architecting the Next-Generation AI Fabric

PSC Annual Conference and Workshop

Photonics Society Of Chinese Heritage (PSC)

中華光電學會

Workshop description

As AI clusters continue to scale, the bottleneck is shifting from raw bandwidth to fabric architecture, power efficiency, and utilization. This workshop explores photonic switching as a system level path to building next generation AI fabrics. Two directions will be explored: data center scale optical circuit switching (OCS) and electrical switching enabled by photonic fabrics, such as co packaged optics (CPO) for high density and energy efficient I/O. The workshop will also discuss emerging photonic switching technologies and the manufacturing and fabrication ecosystem needed for next generation AI infrastructure.

Join leaders from hyperscalers, system vendors, startups, and fabrication platforms to share perspectives and identify practical paths toward scalable AI fabrics.

PSC Opening remarks (5 min)

Partner remarks (5 min)

PSC Tingye Li Memorial Scholarship Announcement (10 min)

Panel Presentation (80 min)

Dr. Cedric F. Lam, Principal Engineer (Director), Google
Dr. Daniel Perez-Lopez, Cofounder and CTO, iPronics
Craig Thompson, Vice President LinkX Products, Networking Group, NVIDIA
Dr. Shenggao Li, Director, TSMC
Rao Lingampall, Senior Director of Engineering - AI Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Dr. Vladimir Kozlov, CEO, LightCounting

Panel Discussion (20 min)

Panel Speakers

Dr. Cedric F. Lam

"Optical Switching and Interconnects in TPU Systems"

Principal Engineer (Director), Google
Cedric F. Lam is now Principal Engineer in the Google Technical Infrastructure team, where he is focused on the development of next generation datacenter networking architectures and interconnect technologies. He was a co-founder of the Google Fiber program which changed the landscape of broadband access networks in North America with the introduction of nationwide Gigabit FTTH networks. Before joining Google, Cedric worked at AT&T and Opvista, a DWDM startup company. He is a Fellow of Optica and a committee member of the Optica Corporate Engagement Council. He serves on many technical conference committees and the editorial board of the IEEE Communications Magazine. He also published two textbooks in fiber access networks.

Dr. Daniel Perez-Lopez

"Silicon photonics switching: the missing link for super scale-up networking"

Cofounder and CTO, iPronics
Daniel Pérez-López (M.Sc., Ph.D.) is the co-founder and CTO of iPronics. Throughout his career, he has been dedicated to the creation, development, and commercialization of programmable photonics, enhancing large-scale photonic integrated circuits with flexibility through real-time software programming. His professional career combines academia with the deep-tech industry. He completed his PhD and postdoctoral research at the Photonics Research Labs of the Universitat Politècnica de València, where he developed novel photonic integrated circuit designs and architectures that can be reconfigured to perform multipurpose functionalities. Dr. Pérez-López’s contributions have been widely recognized, including the prestigious 2017 IEEE Photonics Society Graduate Student Fellowship and his inclusion in the 2023 Photonics100 list by ElectroOptics.

Craig Thompson

"Optical Switching in Large Scale Optical Fabrics"

Vice President LinkX Products, Networking Group at NVIDIA
Craig represents PHY and Interconnect products and technologies across NVIDIA’s end-to-end accelerated computing solutions. Craig has more than 20 years’ experience in optical communications and networking products working at Intel, Gennum, EMC and Finisar prior to NVIDIA. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia, and a MBA from MIT.

Dr. Shenggao Li

"Enabling Energy-Efficient Photonic Networks"

Director, TSMC
Shenggao Li is a Senior Member of IEEE. He earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Tsinghua University, and The Ohio-State University, respectively. He is currently with TSMC, California, serving as a Director focused on high-bandwidth chiplet and photonic interconnects. Previously, he was with Intel as a lead designer for PCIe physical layer implementations in multiple generations of Xeon and Core microprocessors, with hundreds of millions of units deployed in global data centers. Dr. Li co-chairs the UCIe Consortium’s Formfactor and Compliance Working Group, and is a TPC Co-Chair for IEEE CICC 2026. He holds 100+ patents and publications.

Rao Lingampalli

"Scaling AI HPC/GPU Clusters with Optics Evolution"

Senior Director of Engineering - AI Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Rao Lingampalli is currently leading Layer 1 (L1) Engineering team as part of AI Compute Infrastructure Networking at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). His team is responsible for developing specification and implementation of optical link technologies (passive fiber cabling and panel infrastructure, active optics pluggable modules, and forward-looking technologies like CPO) and performance improvement for AI infrastructure services for commercial and large customers. Prior to OCI, he was global head of optical network architecture, engineering, and deployment at Equinix for intra data center optics interconnects, inter data center connection networks and services, submarine cable landing station termination solutions, and optical transport SDN and services automation. Prior to Equinix, Rao held leadership positions in engineering, technical sales and marketing and product management at optical system vendors and Verizon (MCI). He holds seven US patents in data center technologies and services. He holds Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology with fiber optical communications specialization and Executive MBA from Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University.

PSC Dinner Gathering

Photonics Society of Chinese Heritage (PSC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promote friendships and collaborations among Chinese American engineers and scientists in the field of photonics so that they can enhance their professional and business contributions for better quality of life in this fast changing world.