NeoPhotonics Hires Brad Wright as Senior VP of Global Sales

Bradford Wright has been named Senior Vice President of Global Sales at NeoPhotonics Corporation (NYSE: NPTN), a global developer and provider of silicon photonics and advanced hybrid photonic integrated circuit-based lasers, modules, and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks.
Listen to this news story

NeoPhotonics is a major developer and producer of lasers and optoelectronic systems for cloud and hyper-scale data centers, Internet content providers, and telecom networks that send, receive, and switch high-speed digital optical signals.

Bradford Wright offers 25 years of expertise in the communications and semiconductor sectors to NeoPhotonics. Following Cisco Systems’ acquisition of Acacia Communications in January 2018, Mr. Wright was most recently engaged as the head of Worldwide Component Sales and Applications at Cisco Systems.

“There are accelerating demands for high-speed connectivity solutions in hyperscale data centers and in communications equipment companies that demand the technologies and capabilities of NeoPhotonics,” said Brad Wright, Senior Vice President of Global Sales for NeoPhotonics. “I look forward to leveraging my experience in communications and semiconductors to bring NeoPhotonics’ innovative solutions to both new markets and new applications.”

Intel, Altera Corporation

Previously, Mr. Wright was Director of Sales at Intel Corporation, actually from January 2016 until January 2018, after their acquisition of Altera Corporation in 2015, when he held a similar position. Before joining Altera, Mr. Wright worked at Analog Devices and Texas Instruments in a variety of commercial roles with increasing responsibilities.

“On behalf of the Management and Board of Directors, I am pleased to welcome Brad to NeoPhotonics,” said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. “Brad’s extensive experience in both communications and semiconductors will bring direct benefit to our high-speed optical components, modules and semiconductor device solutions for our rapidly expanding high speed markets.”

NeoPhotonics’ solutions would enable cost-effective, high-speed data transfer across long distances and efficient bandwidth allocation in optical networks. NeoPhotonics has its offices located in San Jose, California, and engineering and production facilities in Silicon Valley, Japan, and China.

About the Photonics Technology

Photonics involves technology that focuses on generating, transporting, processing and detecting light, or photons (instead of electrons). Photons have far superior signal-transmission characteristics than electrons. Electrons have a negative charge as well as mass. They have a significant contact with the substance in which they travel in any circumstance. They clash with the material’s lattice, resulting in resistance, which makes a signal flowing through it weaker and weaker.

Because photons have no negative charge and no mass, this is not an issue for the new technology. There are little losses during transit, and heat output is negligible. Photons aren’t affected by electrical or magnetic fields, either.

Currently, the market is attempting to mass-produce relatively basic photonic integrated circuits/chips. The data center industry is probably the first industry that’s going to use this on a broad scale. As the energy consumption of data centers along with the ever-increasing amount of data to be processed is becoming a major concern, data centers are an interesting environment for using photonics. Also, the accelerated increase in data center optical connectivity speeds makes electronics become inadequate for this purpose, making it gradually time to embrace the photonics technology.