CEO and Founder - Tom Baehr-Jones
Dr. Tom Baehr-Jones has been in silicon photonics for 25 years. He was a co-founder of Simulant, which sold the world's first distributed implementation of the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method. Simulant was acquired by Luxtera, which shipped the first CMOS foundry-based silicon photonics products. Luxtera was acquired by Cisco in 2018. Tom also co-founded Elenion, a silicon photonic coherent transceiver company which was acquired by Nokia in 2020. He was the co-director of OpSIS, which was the first silicon photonic multi-project wafer service. Tom is a co-author on over 60 publications and co-inventor on over 20 patents. He was named an Optica Fellow in 2025
Tom has experience working in a range of fields, from simulation to control systems, RF design, process development and software engineering. He has participated in or has been the "grand integrator" of many, many tapeouts, including a number of products that are in use in datacenters and telecommunication infrastructure around the world.
Over the years, Tom has often wished he had better tools for design and tapeout. He founded Tesselmax to create the tools he wished he had when he was leading those tapeouts.
