Michael’s career has spanned the space between fundamental research and commercialization. During his time as an undergraduate in physics at Caltech, he and his collaborator, Tom Baehr-Jones, spun off an electromagnetic supercomputing simulation company called Simulant, which they eventually sold. He co-founded his second company, Luxtera, during his senior year. Luxtera was acquired in 2018 by Cisco Systems for $660,000,000.
Later, Hochberg co-founded both the first silicon photonics design services company, which was acquired by a private equity firm. He co-founded Elenion, which built and shipped several generations of telecommunications and datacenter transceivers before being acquired by Nokia, where he served as the CTO of Optical Subsystems.
His work has been pivotal in the creation of several other companies, in areas including photonic biosensing, chip design services, optical computing, foundry-based fabrication of semiconductor devices, and electronic design automation. He served as president of an AI supercomputing hardware startup for approximately two years.
After returning to Caltech for his post-graduate degrees in 2003, he completed his MS in two years and his Ph.D. in applied physics one year later. On graduation, he won the Demetriades-Tsafka Prize for the best thesis by a graduating Ph.D. student in the field of nanotechnology at Caltech.
Michael has held faculty positions and directed research groups at the University of Washington, University of Delaware, and the National University of Singapore.
Michael founded and then served as the Director of the OpSIS foundry-access service, which built a community of hundreds of silicon photonic designers using common multi-project wafer infrastructure. He sits on the advisory board of AIM Photonics, which is the DOD-backed integrated photonics National Manufacturing Institute.
He published numerous papers and patents, and his work has been cited over 20,000 times (Google Scholar) in the scientific literature. His articles have been published in Science, Nature, and other top scientific journals. His coauthored book, Silicon Photonics Design: From Devices to Systems, was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press and has been widely adopted as a textbook in the field. His publications include work on AI, optical computing, simulation, biosensing, quantum computing and quantum optics, RF photonics, radar systems, photonic and semiconductor devices, transistors, polymers and organic optoelectronics, materials science, and inverse design.
He has held academic appointments in a variety of departments, including Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Physics.
Michael won several awards for his work, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Program Award, a Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship, and a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, which is the highest honor granted by the US government to young scientists.
Recently, Michael has turned his attention to policy, geopolitics, economic statecraft, and grand strategy. He has published in various outlets including National Review Online, The Hill, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, American Spectator, and Naval War College Review. These publications and postings are accessible at longwalls.substack.com.
Hochberg is the President of Periplous LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy, technology, and organization design, and is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University where he is now working on a book devoted to applied geopolitics.
